Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks: Opus 4.5 has 50% horizon of 4h49M

Re:Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks: Opus 4.5 has... by simonw on Sunday December 21, 2025 @05:53PM (#46349452)

If I had four hours to dedicate to this particular learning project I would still use LLMs to help me along the way, with the expectation that I'd learn more from those four hours than I would if I'd spent the same amount of time deliberately not using LLMs to help me.

We've been given a tool that lets us ask questions in human language and get back answers that are correct 90% of the time! And that remaining 10% means we have to engage critically with those answers, which is a useful learning trick in its own right.

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Re:Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks: Opus 4.5 has... by beasthacker on Monday December 22, 2025 @08:20PM (#46361324)

Hypothetical for you:

Learn more if you tried to figure it out yourself for 3 hours then used the LLM for the last hour to unblock/check your work? Or learn more by utilizing LLM for help the whole four hours?

My own experience is what I learn from an LLM sticks better if I take the former approach.

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Re:Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks: Opus 4.5 has... by simonw on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @12:18AM (#46362659)

Depends on the task and my goals. If it was something new to me that I wanted to learn really deeply - and I had the four hours to spend - I might try the LLM-free route for the first three hours like you suggest.

If I found myself needing to do anything unrelated to the learning task, like knock out a quick Bash script, I'd still call on the LLM to get me out of that and help me stay focused on the new skill though.

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