Alternatively, Claude Opus generally output actual code that included more of the original functionality. Even Qwen3-30B-A3B performs better than Gemini, in my experience.

It's honestly really frustrating. The huge context size available with Gemini makes the model family seem like a boon for this task; PCode is very verbose, impinging on the headroom needed for the model's response.

I'd expect de-biasing would deflate grades for well known users.

It might also be interesting to use a search-grounded model that provides citations for its grading claims. Gemini models have access to this via their API, for example.

There are also plenty of reasons not to use proprietary US models for comparison: The major US models haven't been living up to their benchmarks; their releases rarely include training & architectural details; they're not terribly cost effective; they often fail to compare with non-US models; and the performance delta between model releases has plateaued.

A decent number of users in r/LocalLlama have reported that they've switched back from Opus 4.5 to Sonnet 4.5 because Opus' real world performance was worse. From my vantage point it seems like trust in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google is waning and this lack of comparison is another symptom.

Depending on the routing function you can figure out all the active experts ahead of the forward pass for a single token and pipeline the expert loading.

Llama models are also still best in class for specific tasks that require local data processing. They also maintain positions in the top 25 of the lmarena leaderboard (for what that's worth these days with suspected gaming of the platform), which places them in competition with some of the best models in the world.

But, going back to my first point, Llama set the stage for almost all open weights models after. They spent millions on training runs whose artifacts will never see the light of day, testing theories that are too expensive for smaller players to contemplate exploring.

Pegging Llama as mediocre, or a waste of money (as implied elsewhere), feels incredibly myopic.

We're talking about platforms with tens of millions of users; wide appeal is at least a quarter million likes, with mass appeal being at least a million. A local-scale influencer can gather 10-30k likes very easily on such a massive platform.

Similarly, you can't use the LSP to determine all valid in-scope objects for an assignment. You can get a hierarchy of symbol information from some servers, allowing selection of particular lexical scopes within the file, but you'll need to perform type analysis yourself to determine which of the available variables could make for a reasonable completion. That type analysis is also a bit tricky because you'll likely need a lot of information about the type hierarchy at that lexical scope-- something you can't get from the LSP.

It might be feasible to edit an open source LSP implementation for your target language to expose the extra information you'd want, but they're relatively heavy pieces of software and, of course, they don't exist for all languages. Compared to the development cost of "just" using embeddings-- it's pretty clear why teams choose embeddings.

Also, if you assume that the performance improvements we've seen in embeddings for retrieval will continue, it makes less sense to invest weeks of time on something that would otherwise improve passively with time.

A decline in search interest outside of academia makes sense. The groups who can get by on APIs don't care so much how the sausage is made and just want to see prices come down. Interested parties have likely already found tools that work for them.

There's definitely some academic interest outside of CS in producing tools using LLMs. I know plenty of astro folks working to build domain specific tools with open models as their backbone. They're typically not interested in more operational work, I guess because they operate under the assumption that relevant optimizations will eventually make their way into public inference engines.

And CS interest in these models will probably sustain for at least 5-10 more years, even if performance plateaus, as work continues into how LLMs function.

All that to say, maybe we're just seeing the trend die for laypeople?

For juniors: any time you send something important to your manager, confirm they read the document. Don't ask "did you read it?" Don't rely on reactions in chat. Ask a specific question that would require them to read the contents of the document. For example, if you're sending over a quote from a vendor, and you'd already sent another quote before, you could ask "how does this quote compare to the previous one? [link to previous one]" Always get confirmation at least 24-48 hours in advance of the point-of-no-return (e.g. launch, meeting, changing dates, company-wide emails), very preferably in writing.

And for _very_ important meetings, ensure all parties have either acknowledged understanding of the required information, or schedule pre-meeting briefings with individuals. There's nothing quite like getting thrown under the bus because someone showed up and couldn't figure out the subtleties & context on the fly. Unfortunately you can't just say "it's a 12 page document for a reason." when your manager is confused in front of their manager.

We also had a livegrep instance that we could use to grep any corporate repo, regardless of where it was hosted. That was extremely useful for investigating failures in build scripts that spanned multiple repositories (e.g. building a Go sidecar that relies on a service config in the Java monorepo).

In general it was pretty rare, in my experience. The code bases were pretty well modularized.

You can auto- lint and test code before you set eyes on it, then re-run the prompt with either more context or an altered prompt. With local models there are options like steering vectors, fine-tuning, and constrained decoding as well.

There's also evidence that multiple models of different lineages, when their outputs are rated and you take the best one at each input step, can surpass the performance of better models. So if one model knows something the others don't you can automatically fail over to the one that can actually handle the problem, and typically once the knowledge is in the chat the other models will pick it up.

Not saying we have the solution to your specific problem in any readily available software, but that there are approaches specific to your problem that go beyond current methods.

Whisper + an LLM can recover some of the gaps by filling in contextually plausible bits, but then it's not a transcript and may contain hallucinations.

There are alternatives that share Whisper internal states with an LLM to improve ASR, as well as approaches that sample N-best hypotheses from Whisper and fine-tune an LLM to distill the hypotheses into a single output. Haven't looked too much into these yet given how expensive each component is to run independently.

[0]: https://discord.com/channels/729741769192767510/730095596861...