AI agents have no sense of time and are not aware of it

A new study finds that popular coding assistants can't predict how long a task will take, and they can't reliably tell how long they've already been working. That's a problem for long-running jobs.

When an AI assistant works on a task, it often has no idea how much time is passing. That's the takeaway from a study by two independent AI researchers, done as part of the MATS research program. The pair tested two widely used coding assistants, Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, on their sense of time.

Before each coding task, the agents had to estimate how long they'd need. Then they solved the task and, looking back, reported how much time had passed. The test material came from 200 tasks in a collection called ProgramBench, plus the researchers' own suite of 18 benchmarks.

In the tests, the agents consistently overestimated how much time they'd need. On ProgramBench, both models mostly guessed around 90 minutes, no matter the difficulty. In the second round, Claude was off by three times on average, Codex by six to ten times. The estimates were worst for short tasks, and only in the multi-hour range did some predictions come close to reality.

The same AI behaves completely differently depending on its setup