What this set cost to produce

Written by a person. Last read by a person on 2026-09-07, 1 day ago. Its facts were checked by the eval suite on 2026-09-07.

You want the scale of the work, or you are judging a claim about what assistance changes.

Scenario-based sample. Halden Systems is invented, and so is every figure about it.

Bottom line. What the set represents, and what assistance changed. About 168 working hours unassisted and 69 assisted, a factor of 2.4. The calendar barely moves: 133 elapsed days against 100, a factor of 1.3, because most of the calendar is waiting for other people.

The set is the 11 documents describing Halden Systems, listed in the table below.

Every figure below is an estimate, not a measurement. An estimate presented as a measurement is the same failure as an unverified statistic.

The headline, with the qualifier attached

Those two rows describe the same work, and the gap between them is the point.

Per artifact, which is where the pattern is visible:

Assistance compresses the hours somebody spends. It barely moves the calendar, because most of the calendar is waiting: 3 weeks of a survey in the field, a vendor response window, references who answer when they answer.

Reporting the first number as delivery speed is how this claim is usually overstated. Anyone who has run a procurement will catch it in the room.

The honest version is more useful anyway. It says where to put the assistance and where not to bother.

Where the compression is, and where it is not

The survey is the clearest case in the set: 45 percent fewer working hours and 11 percent less clock time. The instrument can be drafted in an afternoon. The 3 weeks in the field do not move, and the pilot before it does not move either.

The budget and vendor work has the longest elapsed time of anything here and is the least affected. 45 days becomes forty. The response window is the response window.

The literature review compresses hardest on the finding-and-summarizing and least on the part that matters. Assistance is good at locating sources and stating what they claim. Deciding which are load-bearing, and which are a vendor citing its own survey back to itself, requires having read them. That reading is most of the 8 hours, and skipping it is how unverified figures enter a document and stay there for a decade.

What did not compress at all

Every artifact in data/effort.yaml carries a line naming the part assistance did not touch, and they have a shape in common. Each one is a decision rather than a draft.

Knowing that revenue is the largest number in the case and the weakest evidence in it. Choosing to say so on the slide, rather than hoping nobody asks.

Deciding what each persona rules out. That is the difference between six plausible people and an instrument that refutes a bad proposal.

Writing the out-of-scope section of a contract, which is specific to what this buyer will assume. Writing kill criteria for your own program. Cutting the deck.

That distinction is the argument this portfolio is making about AI, and it is the same argument the program in the scenario makes to 3,000 people: assistance compresses drafting and synthesis, and does not compress deciding. A leader who cannot tell those apart will either refuse the tool or over-trust it, and both failures are visible in the survey data.

Why this belongs in a summary a recruiter reads

Two reasons, and the second is the real one.

It sets the scale. A reader can tell in one line whether they are looking at a weekend's work or a month's, which is otherwise guessed from polish.

It also demonstrates the competence being hired for. A director of learning will be asked what these tools do to their function's capacity, by an executive who has heard a tenfold claim and does not believe it. The answer here is 2.4 on hours, 1.3 on the calendar, with the boundary named. That answer is worth more in the room than a larger number would be, because it can survive the follow-up question.