What happened in the computer programming space (with testable outputs) is that the first pass 80% accuracy nailed down an 80% success rate - wrote code that successfully met requirements 4/5 trials. Then, the agents were able to repeat the 1/5 failing trials with “sufficient heat” to both find their problems and create workable solutions, again 4/5 trials - so 80% success rate becomes 96% success rate, and so on… Back in early 2025, programming LLM agents would get themselves caught in iterative loops - trying, failing, trying again, failing again, then trying the first approach again - failing indefinitely. By mid 2026, I don’t see that behavior anymore - if the first “light pass - quick attempt” solution doesn’t succeed, they dig in deeper - do more research specifically focused on the problem areas identified in the first failure and try again, generally successful by the 2nd try, almost always by the 3rd - I haven’t had to break a “trying the first unworkable solution again because I can’t think of anything else to do” loop in over 6 months.
Not all problem spaces are as clear-cut as software creation, but many have similar rules that just take a bit more training to learn.
What happened in the computer programming space (with testable outputs) is that the first pass 80% accuracy nailed down an 80% success rate - wrote code that successfully met requirements 4/5 trials. Then, the agents were able to repeat the 1/5 failing trials with “sufficient heat” to both find their problems and create workable solutions, again 4/5 trials - so 80% success rate becomes 96% success rate, and so on… Back in early 2025, programming LLM agents would get themselves caught in iterative loops - trying, failing, trying again, failing again, then trying the first approach again - failing indefinitely. By mid 2026, I don’t see that behavior anymore - if the first “light pass - quick attempt” solution doesn’t succeed, they dig in deeper - do more research specifically focused on the problem areas identified in the first failure and try again, generally successful by the 2nd try, almost always by the 3rd - I haven’t had to break a “trying the first unworkable solution again because I can’t think of anything else to do” loop in over 6 months.
Not all problem spaces are as clear-cut as software creation, but many have similar rules that just take a bit more training to learn.
They Don’t pass 4/5.
They pass 0/5 because they are 80% (that number is way too optimistic btw) accurate to human output on every one of the five attempts.
They also can’t be forced to learn and retake the trial because they don’t have any contextual awareness, they just guess the next word in a sequence.
Even if a machine made 4 self edits sucessfully, it would be permanently disfigured by the one failure and no longer be capable of making good edits.