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khafra | 1 month ago
A coding agent just beat every human in the AtCoder Heuristic optimization contest. It also beat the solution that the production team for the contest put together. https://sakana.ai/ahc058/
It's not enterprise-grade software, but it's not a CRUD app with thousands of examples in github, either.
tete|1 month ago
Optimization space that has been automated before LLMs. Big surprise, machines are still better at this.
This feels a bit like comparing programming teams to automated fuzzing.
In fact not too rarely developing algorithms involved some kind of automated algorithm testing where the algorithm is permuted in an automatic manner.
It's also a bit like how OCR and a couple of other fields (protein folding) are better to be done in an automated manner.
The fact that now this is done by an LLM, another machine isn't exactly surprising. Nobody claims that computers aren't good at these kinds of tasks.
fmbb|1 month ago
Optimization is a very simple problem though.
Maintaining a random CRUD app from some startup is harder work.
lazyasciiart|1 month ago
matwood|1 month ago
C'mon, there's post every other week that optimization never happens anymore because it's too hard. If AI can take all the crap code humans are writing and make it better, that sounds like a huge win.
PunchyHamster|1 month ago
tripzilch|1 month ago
> AHC058, held on December 14, 2025, was conducted over a 4-hour competition window. The problem involved a setting where participants could produce machines with hierarchical relationships, such as multiple types of “apple-producing machines” and “machines that build those machines.” The objective was to construct an efficient production planning algorithm by determining which types and hierarchies of machines to upgrade and in what specific order.
... so not a CRUD app but it beat humans at Cookie Clicker? :-)