Equation 2 · Ten Failure Modes That Define Production Claude Code Use
What does this equation mean?
Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
This mathematical expression combines the displayed quantities; its precise role follows from the surrounding article text. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
Read it piece by piece
Symbol t
t is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
How to interpret it
Read this expression with the definitions, units, and assumptions supplied by the article.
What the article says around this equation
It is intuitive to expect an agentic session to improve as it accumulates context about a task. The measured pattern runs the other way. METR’s time-horizon research tracks the length of task — measured in how long a skilled human would take — that a frontier model can complete autonomously with a given reliability, and finds current frontier models near 100% success on tasks taking a human under four minutes, collapsing to under 10% success on tasks taking more than about four hours, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet reported specifically among the models exhibiting this drop-off [ 13 ] . The organization’s headline trend — the task length completable at 50% reliability doubling roughly every seven…
Read the full surrounding passage
It is intuitive to expect an agentic session to improve as it accumulates context about a task. The measured pattern runs the other way. METR’s time-horizon research tracks the length of task — measured in how long a skilled human would take — that a frontier model can complete autonomously with a given reliability, and finds current frontier models near 100% success on tasks taking a human under four minutes, collapsing to under 10% success on tasks taking more than about four hours, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet reported specifically among the models exhibiting this drop-off [ 13 ] . The organization’s headline trend — the task length completable at 50% reliability doubling roughly every seven months over six years of measurement — is worth writing as an explicit model rather than a slogan, because it is the empirical claim the section rests on: if is the task duration completable at 50% reliability at year t , METR’s fit is
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
Return to Ten Failure Modes That Define Production Claude Code Use