<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: gertlabs</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gertlabs</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:52:38 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=gertlabs" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We've seen a pretty consistent pattern in our evaluations where Go is among the languages that models perform worst with (alongside Python), for reasons unclear. Our coding evaluations are typically measuring the foresight and planning expressed in code that is run in interactive environments/games.<p>This trend has been there since we started evaluating models using different languages in February 2026 and if anything, the disparity has grown in frontier models. Even Google models prefer Kotlin/C#/Rust for coming up with creative ideas (compilation success is a different story). Data at <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings</a><p>That being said, models love to recommend Go, and Go does have a lot going for it, especially if you are serving a public-facing website. So most of our public facing API handlers are written in Go, and we offload some of our most important binaries to Rust. There are just too many reasons not to use the languages that models think a little more effectively in.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:06:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49267716</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49267716</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49267716</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>SlimeBallBench? Looks cool, love the implementation! You would most likely need a LOT of environments like these if your goal was selling them to labs</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 03:35:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192132</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192132</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192132</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The reality is that cost is the primary constraint for the public benchmark we provide. While we run enough samples to get results that are generally quite accurate on average, we only produce ~10 coding submissions per language for each model and those are across random environments, which naturally has noise. Plus that's split between agentic coding sessions and one-shot coding.<p>So just adding a language or tag filter can result in some pretty small sample sizes. You can see how many samples survived in the box plot, but that's probably bad UX that most people never see. There's a reason no other benchmark provides this type of data (even for our sample sizes it runs almost 10K USD/month to keep up to date with new releases).<p>Might be a good idea to reduce the ability to apply filters into a cohort with less than ~20 samples -- not the first time we've gotten that feedback. Seems like adding too many options to see individual sample variation is just misdirecting. I'm a nerd who loves data so I hate removing access, especially since the aggregate performance is very interesting (averaged across all languages, we see consistent and interesting performance data across models, like models outperforming with strongly typed languages). But tbh I think you're right and we'll try limiting filters to where we actually have statistically significant data.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:38:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175550</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175550</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175550</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's a different problem than benchmark saturation, and it's something that we are actively working on measuring objectively.<p>I agree that Opus 5 is not a great model, despite being clearly intelligent. It seems like a personality problem in user-driven agentic coding workflows, not a real capability issue. Not incorporating unspoken user intent, going off topic, incorporating some of the pedantry you find in GPT 5.x models, etc.<p>That's also likely why Opus 5 ranks low on our "Social Intelligence" benchmark (<a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=decision" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=decision</a>), although sample sizes on this one are still low.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:50:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172332</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172332</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172332</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I started thinking about this back after the Llama 4 release, and since then our team has put a lot of thought into designing evaluations that don't saturate, are resistant to contamination, and can scale. What has worked best for us is using multi-agent environments with open-ended cooperative or competitive goals. Mostly designed as multiplayer games. The results tend to align with our experience for coding better than any non-aggregator benchmark, and likely at lower cost to run.<p>Data at <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:13:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171826</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171826</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171826</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "ARC-AGI Leaderboard"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We run an evaluation that is designed to be less vulnerable to benchmaxxing because there aren't correct solutions; agents are interacting in the same environment as other agents. And it's private, and our public benchmark is not well known enough for anyone to probably care to benchmax us yet. So I think it's pretty indicative of true relative aptitude.<p>All models have probably memorized significant swaths of solution sets for popular benchmarks at this point, either accidentally or intentionally, so it's all relative at this point. However, in our experience, Chinese models do benchmax harder. This is also consistent with interacting with Chinese labs soliciting data/environments, who literally asked us for datasets and tasks modeled around and formatted like popular benchmarks.<p>Opus 5 will be uploaded tomorrow, but we already have the tests locally and it is truly as capable as Fable, but at 81% of the real cost. (And from subjective usage, it has a very different personality)<p>Data at <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:32:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050269</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050269</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050269</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The Efficiency tab at <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=oneshot_coding" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=oneshot_coding</a>  (only have cost data for the coding evaluations)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:05:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024871</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024871</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024871</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, they are all benchmaxxed, but the question is how benchmaxxed they are relative to each other.<p>We run an evaluation that only compares models in open-ended multi-agent environments where agents affect each other, primarily testing writing code. It's designed to be less vulnerable because there's no solution set, and it's been pretty effective and tends to rank Chinese models lower than their advertised model cards (relative to US models). Kimi K3 is a bit of an exception there -- it truly is a near-frontier model. But it's so slow. Ironically, Muse Spark 1.1 is one of the strongest models we've tested after Fable and Sol while also leading the cost efficiency curve. Big turnaround from Llama 4.<p>Data at <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 05:43:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002302</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002302</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002302</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Better Agent Leagues and Decision Supervision from Branched Rollouts]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://gertlabs.com/blog/verdict">https://gertlabs.com/blog/verdict</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48975007">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48975007</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:35:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://gertlabs.com/blog/verdict</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48975007</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48975007</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "Moonshot AI suspends new subscriptions due to Kimi K3 demand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In our multi-agent game coding evaluations, we usually see Chinese models struggle in one-shot reasoning but make up for it with tool use and iterating towards better solutions. Kimi K3 follows that pattern, ranking 19th in one-shot coding and <i>3rd</i> in agentic coding (where the model gets a harness and tools and many calls to iterate toward better code). Only Sol and Fable have better average agentic coding submissions.<p>Agentic coding is what's most relevant to software engineers, but so is speed, which is a real usability issue right now. Third-party inference providers like Fireworks have bridged the gap for some previous releases.<p>It's exciting to see the open weights frontier becoming the norm. Competing on having the frontier model is going to be an increasingly difficult business.<p>Data at <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=agentic_coding" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=agentic_coding</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 04:06:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974229</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974229</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974229</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "Ring-Zero: Scaling Zero RL to a Trillion Parameters for Emergent Reasoning"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>LLM as judge / self-distillation is effective insofar as it can make models more reliably do things they are already capable of. But I agree that for pushing the frontier of what a model is capable of understanding and producing, incestuous is a good word and it's unlikely to scale far.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:34:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48952929</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48952929</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48952929</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "GPT-5.6"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The human solutions are all written in Python, which creates a significant length bias, whereas the AI models are assigned to create solutions randomly distributed across 11 relevant programming languages, most of which are inherently more verbose than Python.<p>I have not broken down the comment/code ratio, but that's actually a really interesting idea for a metric.<p>I would also like to test Cursor, but our policy is to only test models available on public routers for now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:51:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864406</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864406</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864406</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "GPT-5.6"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Gemini models struggle with agentic coding/tool use/exploration, but they are actually quite smart in one-shot reasoning. They're not as far behind as people think. It's mostly post-training and productization issues, which are easier to fix than pre-training/mid-training issues.<p>Agentic coding data: <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=agentic_coding" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=agentic_coding</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:49:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864378</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864378</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864378</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's a much shorter and more elegant proof than I was expecting, especially after reading some of the earlier Erdos proofs. GPT 5.6 Sol is the real deal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:34:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864214</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864214</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864214</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "Grok 4.5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Grok 4.5 is a huge step up from their next best model and now around the same performance as GLM 5.2, but it's not exactly at the frontier of the cost efficiency curve in our coding evaluations. That curve is defined by the 2 lighter GPT 5.6 models.<p>However, the fact that they finally have a strong post-training and RL setup bodes well for future releases. They certainly are not compute-constrained anymore.<p>Data at <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=oneshot_coding" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=oneshot_coding</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:28:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855754</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855754</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855754</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "GPT-5.6"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We have it slightly ahead of Fable in our multi-agent coding evaluations.<p>Fable's main advantage is that its average solution size is smaller. However, GPT 5.6 Sol is a substantial improvement from GPT 5.4/5.5 which would write verbose, defensive code. 31KB for GPT 5.4/5.5 down to 26KB for GPT 5.6 Sol, with better performance for Sol.<p>Fable scores slightly lower, but with an average solution size of 12.2 KB.<p>Data at <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=oneshot_coding" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=oneshot_coding</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:17:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855684</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855684</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855684</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "Claude Sonnet 5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In our coding evaluations, we found Sonnet 5 is more capable than Sonnet 4.6 (which was an underrated model itself), but is now faster and slightly cheaper.<p>Sonnet 5's performance is comparable to GLM 5.2 in both one-shot coding and agentic ability. However, it's about ~20% less verbose than GLM 5.2 in average code submission sizes, and uses fewer reasoning tokens, which reduces the cost gap and suggests it writes cleaner code. In practice, Sonnet 5 ends up being 40% more expensive and ~2x faster than GLM 5.2 in our evaluations (not 300% more expensive as the per-token pricing would suggest). Granted, GLM 5.2 is an extremely reasoning heavy model.<p>Overall, it's a solid release that gives Anthropic some standing in the price-conscious inference market.<p>Data at <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:32:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743398</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743398</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743398</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is something we omit for a few reasons but it's probably the biggest blind spot in our evaluations; we opt-in to auto-reasoning/adaptive reasoning or max thinking token budgets where supported (supported by most models now), but when an explicit reasoning level is required, we fall back to High reasoning. In practice, we've found most models scale High-><whatever marketing term is max reasoning> pretty consistently, but if one vendor started throwing 10x the resources into max reasoning and they didn't support auto-reasoning, they would be unfairly penalized in our evaluations.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2026 22:00:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48725864</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48725864</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48725864</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It would have made things easier for us if Sonnet 4.6 scored lower, but it's a great model and the data is real.<p>It doesn't have a higher capability score than Fable, though. We break our coding evaluations into 2 parts, and "one-shot coding" makes up part of the index, where Fable significantly outperforms every other model, which is why it's ranked at the top despite Sonnet 4.6 having a slightly higher median (and lower average) in long-horizon agentic workloads. One-shot coding tends to be the most correlated with other companies' model cards, whereas agentic coding is partly about how well a model can adapt to a custom harness. Fable also refused some tasks.<p>Data at <a href="https://gertlabs.com/rankings?ow=1&mode=oneshot_coding" rel="nofollow">https://gertlabs.com/rankings?ow=1&mode=oneshot_coding</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:28:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48721329</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48721329</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48721329</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gertlabs in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We've spent some time trying to understand this anomaly, even re-running Sonnet 4.6 through our evaluations to see if that would bring down its scores... and it didn't. I don't know what they did differently, but it's basically Opus 4.6 with more temperature variability (some great responses, some less great, with an approximately frontier median response in agentic work specifically). It is smart, methodical and excellent at tool calling in our custom environments.<p>We now use Sonnet 4.6 for a number of internal use cases we wouldn't have considered otherwise.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2026 04:36:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714848</link><dc:creator>gertlabs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714848</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714848</guid></item></channel></rss>