Golden Data

The workbench, measured on itself

The agent-vs-human scorecard

Every task I complete gets tagged with who did it — agent or human. This is the two-column readout of that split from my own task log: outcome rate, dollars per instance, and minutes to complete. No pitch — just the numbers, aggregated straight out of the database and stripped of everything personal before they ever reach this page.

Agent

skills, automations, scheduled runs

Cost / instance
$0.94
Minutes / instance
9.4 minmed 5
Outcome rate
96.6%
Completed
285of 295

Human

me, by hand

Cost / instance
$30.45
Minutes / instance
41 minmed 30
Outcome rate
99.3%
Completed
286of 288
$29.51cheaper per instance when the agent handles it
4.3×faster — 9.4 min vs 41 min
2.7 ptsoutcome gap — the human lane still closes more of what it starts

Week of 7/6: agent slice closed 54.5% at $1.25; human slice closed 85.7% at $26.63.

Per-instance cost, week by week

The agent lane came online in June — that near-vertical drop is work moving off my hands.

Agent Human
How every number here is derived
  • Handler is the real origin tag on each task (agent or human) — 583 tasks, tagged as I go, not reconstructed after the fact.
  • Outcome % = completed ÷ started for that lane. Minutes is logged time per task (actuals where I have them, my estimate otherwise).
  • $/instance is the one modelled figure: minutes × a fixed per-handler rate — $0.75/min for human labor (≈$45/hr) and $0.10/min for agent compute + oversight. Change those two rates and every dollar figure moves; nothing else is invented.
  • Privacy. These figures come from anonymized database views that emit only counts and durations — never a task title, note, or category. A dbt leak gate blocks publishing if any personal string slips through.
  • Honest caveats. The agent lane only started being tagged in June, so its history is short. One heavy batch week (208 agent tasks) reflects automation backfilling a queue. This is a workbench measuring itself, not a benchmark.

Read live from the database at build time · data as of Jul 10, 2026