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meander_watertoday at 7:42 AM4 repliesview on HN

> So we ran it head-to-head against Claude Opus 4.8: same one-shot prompt, build a 3D platformer in raw WebGL from scratch

Running a single one-shot prompt is not a benchmark, not is it representative of any sort of real-world usage.

Most agent usage is collaborative so you need to test things like reliability (when I delegate a task, does it complete it without making up test results for e.g.) and steerability (does it obey my instructions or does it just do what it thinks is best).


Replies

jameswhitfordtoday at 7:46 AM

Hi, I am the author, I completely agree! I set out to run a vibe test on this one, not a benchmark, the real benchmarks are listed. My test shows what the models can do when both tasked with a long-running, technically difficult, one-shot task.

I think your test you describe (collaborative, task delegation, task completion, TTD, steerability) is a great format for a future test that I will definitely try out.

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esperenttoday at 7:58 AM

On the other hand, I did just leave my pi agent running GPT 5.5 overnight on a clearly defined, long running task. It's been running about 10 hours now and it's mostly done. So this kind of use case is also valid.

Thinking about it, I would say that the majority of agentic work I do, by a long shot, is subagents which are launched from the main session, using a prompt of its choosing. Those could be considered short versions of these fully autonomous tasks.

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ritzacotoday at 7:44 AM

sure that's why we look at a mix of formal benchmarks, one longer analysis of a side-by-side, and various other people who we trust to form an opinion, all covered in the article - not intended to be a formal benchmark, there are enough of those.

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unliftedqtoday at 8:34 AM

Totally agree, a single one-shot prompt can't prove anything.