| A1 | the wall — the unstaffed midnight hours between a raw file and a first plot | an evening or two per messy file — defensive parsing rewritten from scratch each project, rules forgotten by the time they work | ~10 minutes for the quick win, plus the same task re-run in the other language for free |
| A2 | you, working an order of magnitude faster — but only if you direct the work | the slow tax of an undriven session — drifted answers on long investigations, re-runs to find where it went wrong | ~30 min to learn; thereafter a first-look on one month (3.5M rows) in minutes, with receipts |
| B1 | the lab manual nobody writes — the institutional knowledge that lives in your head | ~30 min re-onboarding every new RA, every time — plus the afternoons lost to landmines no one wrote down | written once in an hour; reloaded free at the start of every session thereafter |
| B2 | careful senior who plans before touching data | ~1 week at project start (setup, download babysitting, plan review) + the joins redone when structure rots | an afternoon — most of it download wall-clock, not attention |
| B3 | the data manager who guards the raw files — the person who says no near the master copies | permanent vigilance you cannot staff — one lapse at machine speed costs a month of re-downloads | two profiles configured once in minutes; the fence then holds every session, tired or not |
| C1 | the methodologist — the one person who knows how the lab actually decides | the judgment lives in one head; transferring it to a new RA costs weeks of shadowing, and leaves when they do | an afternoon to author three SKILL.md files in both dialects; zero cost per session until invoked |
| C2 | data manager / QA who never sleeps | permanent vigilance — est. 2 weeks/year of load-checking and release-note reading | half a day to install and test the 9-line block; ~20 s per run thereafter |
| C3 | the data engineer who wires the lab to its systems | days of bespoke glue per source — credentials, retries, schema spelunking, timezone forensics — re-debugged every time a source changes | register the server once; the agent explores INFORMATION_SCHEMA and builds the panel in a guided session, raw cached for replication |
| D1 | the RA pool — and the adviser who critiques from outside | a week of breadth EDA across boroughs and slices, plus a literature pass — and no honest outside critic you can summon at will | ~20 min to write the agent definition + report contract; the fleet runs in parallel; the isolated adviser critiques in minutes |
| D2 | the lab whose members don't overwrite each other | the lost afternoon disentangling two agents' colliding edits — and the redo when you reconstruct it wrong the first time | two commands to create the worktrees; the parallelism runs free; one reviewed merge at the end |
| D3 | overnight RA | one night shift per estimation batch — and the course runs several batches | ~10 min to write the check or the objective; the night itself belongs to the machine |
| D4 | an RA bench and the PI who keeps their results comparable | the curve is ~2 days of serialized edit-and-fit; the suspicious read of the robustness table is the rarer, senior hour nobody has time for | 13 lanes fanned out under the cap finish in an afternoon; the referee files its evidenced finding in one isolated pass |
| E1 | reproducibility checker | a clean-room rebuild every few weeks — dull, exacting, and the first thing dropped at submission | ~20 min to wire scripts/replicate.sh and the gate workflow; the verdict returns in one headless run thereafter |
| E2 | lab manager's standing chores | a recurring monthly chore nobody owns — check the CDN, pull, contract, append, re-estimate — reliably skipped | ~30 min to define the routine + guardrails once; each month runs unattended and stops at the approval gate |
| E3 | the onboarding the lab never has to repeat | six weeks of per-member onboarding, rediscovered from scratch every time the lab turns over | ~half a day to package and smoke-test the kit once; each new member is one install and one prompt |
| F1 | the whole lab, orchestrated — the PI who designs the system instead of doing the work | each revision is a serialized chain — re-spec, re-estimate, re-table, rewrite the paragraph, re-read the abstract — correct only as of the last manual pass, on a Sunday; a real reviewer round is days of hand-carried edits | the loop runs two iterations to convergence in one supervised sitting; the human stands at exactly one gate (approve dropping the post-treatment control) while the mechanical fixes proceed unattended |