Article URL: https://epoch.ai/MirrorCode Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157786 Points: 41 # Comments: 31

Crucially, we provide a large enough inference budget to make a serious attempt at MirrorCode tasks. Many existing software engineering benchmarks limit inference spending to around $1–10, even when the task would take weeks for a human to complete. For example, one of the largest MirrorCode tasks cost $2,600 for a single run and involved AI working for 19 days without human intervention. Reimplementing entire programs is extremely challenging for human software engineers. We believe a human engineer without AI would take months to solve the most complex MirrorCode tasks. However, MirrorCode tasks are also feasible; we know that there is enough information for the tasks to be fair. We sandbox AI models, requiring them to conduct their work without access to the internet, without access to the original codebase, and with no way to cheat on the task. There are end-to-end tests that models never see while developing their code, so they cannot simply create a lookup table to mimic the original program's outputs.