What can you reasonably expect from Claude Code? Let me show you some fascinating research from Meta that gives us concrete numbers.

The folks at Meta have done a study - and they're continuing to refine it - which is quite interesting for software engineering. They came up with a bunch of tasks that are things a software developer might be asked to do. You might be asked to implement a simple web server, or implement a dictionary attack. These are realistic tasks.

They got a bunch of people together and measured how long it takes them to complete each task. Typically, implementing a simple web server takes about 22 to 23 minutes on average. Implementing a dictionary attack takes about 16 to 17 minutes on average.

Here's what's remarkable: the length of time it takes a human being to do the task directly maps to how likely the AI is to complete it. What they found is that a task that takes about 20 minutes for a human being to do, Claude can complete about 80% of the time.

That's an 80% success rate on 20-minute tasks. If you have tasks that take around 20 minutes, you can expect Claude to complete them successfully four times out of five.

And we're seeing this curve improve exponentially - it's doubling every seven months. So at the moment, 20 minutes gets you 80% success. Seven months from now, we'd expect that level of success on 40-minute tasks. By the end of next year, we're looking at 80% success rates on tasks that take an hour and a half.

This is the foundation for understanding how Claude Code can accelerate your development work.