I am trying to estimate if my reaction to seeing GPT-5.6 Sol last on that list is reasonable or or mostly emotional and find that I have no way of telling.
My intuition is that many of the better & bigger 'private' code bases, at least in terms of claude code and codex... are not in fact private at this point.
One lesson of running botsbench.com, in a slightly different domain, is to measure for model contamination every time.
this is the closest benchmark to my experience using the model harness combo. Astra for as great as it is falls slightly behind Fable 5.1 for me for large feature work (although it comments code much better). in particular, Fable is able to assess priority better than Astra (meaning Astra sometimes does things that aren’t worthwhile while missing things that are clearly important, particularly on possible ballooning scenarios- fable catches “this works for x amount of data but if we run this on y way greater than x amount of data we’ll run into issues). Gemini 3.8 is under appreciated, use Google Stitch to see it in action if you haven’t used Agy yet.
Astra constantly does this for me. It goes 90% of the way with some task but then skips the most important part. Then when told to please fix that and do it properly, it suddenly goes down a rabbit hole for 6h and fixes scenarios that aren't even relevant. It's awful at assessing what is important to do and what not, and where to ask for permission and where not.
lot of ads everywhere offering to buy your codebase of real product/star up even it long gone or failed (offer usually price per lines of code). So most likely that they have bunch of abandoned codebases between small and medium sizes and probably also some fake codebases as well.
My gut feeling is that any serious real-world company with a proprietary codebase worth looking at would not be handing out the crown jewels to a third party. License or not.
I don't doubt somebody licensed their codebase to them, I just have my doubts about who the "who" could be.
Code isn't worth all that much if you don't own the associated IP, mainly copyright. And even if you disagree with that premise, if you trust that they can keep the code secret, it's basically free money.
At any rate, I'm not sure it matters whose codebase it is. I'd even say that a shitty codebase might make for a better test.
Terminal bench 4 is good largely because it's recent so it hasn't been benchmaxxed yet. It's more of a sysadmin/devops benchmark than a coding benchmark though, but still a decent proxy.
So TL;DR benchmarking in a completely non-reproducible manner ?
"Model X performed great, but we can't possibly tell you anything about the code it was looking at apart from it was a large code base from an unknown company".
In theory, as long as all the models are doing the same thing with the same tools, it's at least useful to see how they stack up against each other right now. It might not be great to track progress over time, as it can get benchmaxxed or the underlying resources may become obsolete.
> You're giving up transparency for it being harder to game
But then if we take that argument to its natural extreme, surely it means people should take the marketing bullshit published in the 100-page system cards published by Anthropic & co as "valuable" too ?
I think you know that's basically nothing like this? The model cards have every incentive to be biased, this doesn't necessarily.
But even so, pretty much yes: companies that actually have reliable and accurate info in their releases get trusted more. It takes time because the default is to disbelieve info from biased sources, but it is possible to trust some of them more than others.
I think these benchmarks are not that useful, e.g. this suggests Fable is better than Astra, but in practice Astra is waaaaaay faster (like 5x; it's not even close), and also waaaay less annoying to talk to.
There's only two or three sane options here - you can easily try them all and pick yourself.
The fact that gemini 3.8 flash is so high up there just tells you this is an awful benchmark.
Try and use gemini 3.8 yourself for any real world work and you'll see it's terrible. It'll just go in circles reading the same file 20 times for no reason making hundreds of tool calls for a simple change.
Hard disagree. I use 3.8 flash in Antigravity a lot, and thoroughly prefer it to most Pro-class models. It's really fast, and I've had it make crazy progress on compiler-like problems that previous models including Opus simply failed at. On ultra plan you can have it going for hours, and make incremental progress with good prompting for review interrupts. It solved a problem I couldn't solve for weeks in under 6 hours. 10k LOC total. The harness and test suite is key.
Why so brazenly confident? Isn’t it possible that the benchmark is correct, and your experience is correct too, but you haven’t tried all the thousand different modalities of work that programming encompasses and so maybe you don’t actually have standing to judge?
One lesson of running botsbench.com, in a slightly different domain, is to measure for model contamination every time.
How does that work?
My gut feeling is that any serious real-world company with a proprietary codebase worth looking at would not be handing out the crown jewels to a third party. License or not.
I don't doubt somebody licensed their codebase to them, I just have my doubts about who the "who" could be.
At any rate, I'm not sure it matters whose codebase it is. I'd even say that a shitty codebase might make for a better test.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/terminalbench-v4-0
"Model X performed great, but we can't possibly tell you anything about the code it was looking at apart from it was a large code base from an unknown company".
So basically pinky-promise benchmarking ?
I'm not sure I follow the value here ?
But then if we take that argument to its natural extreme, surely it means people should take the marketing bullshit published in the 100-page system cards published by Anthropic & co as "valuable" too ?
But even so, pretty much yes: companies that actually have reliable and accurate info in their releases get trusted more. It takes time because the default is to disbelieve info from biased sources, but it is possible to trust some of them more than others.
There's only two or three sane options here - you can easily try them all and pick yourself.
Try and use gemini 3.8 yourself for any real world work and you'll see it's terrible. It'll just go in circles reading the same file 20 times for no reason making hundreds of tool calls for a simple change.