HCAST

HCAST (Human-Calibrated Autonomy Software Tasks) is a 90-task benchmark from METR designed to measure AI autonomy with human-calibrated baselines — every task has known completion times from professional software engineers, enabling direct human-vs-AI comparison. Tasks span realistic software engineering scenarios at varying difficulty levels, from simple bug fixes to complex architectural changes. The human calibration is what makes HCAST distinctive: instead of just pass/fail, it reveals whether AI agents are 10x slower, equally fast, or approaching superhuman speed on specific task types.