alt Hacker News> Spend at least 8 hours on this before even thinking of returning or giving up.
Do current model harnesses have concepts of amount of time spent? Sometimes the model notices if a subprocess takes too long/hangs and kills it, but I've never seen it time itself.
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they can call CLI tools to notice the passage of time. the harness can include timestamps too
of you ask it, surely it can run a "time" in its sandbox from time to time and see how long it worked for
It is not necessarily the case that the instruction needs be taken literally
No, however, if they have the ability to get the current time, they obey constraints like these in a way a model a year ago didn't.
that can run date
The voice models certainly can't: https://kittygr.am/reel/DWr31A1B1Ux/
Many harnesses include a current date and time in their system prompt, and if there is a way for the model to call for an updated time (either a dedicated time tool or calling the OS' `date` tool) they can track time they spent doing something. If not told up-front, they can try to infer it from timestamps in their logs. Sort of like a human - if you ask them to time something and give them a stopwatch, they do it. If you ask them post-facto they'll estimate it.
This "spend at least 8 hours" trick is a new one to me, though.