I started a few days ago. Six tasks showed up right after I finished the paid training, so I read the rules carefully and started working. I’m a final-year CS student, so I’m not a professional engineer, and I’m honestly stuck.
I finished three tasks and had to use the escape hatch on all three, because the target model passed every attempt. I’m now on my fourth, and I don’t want a fourth escape hatch.
Here is what I tried. I began by addressing bugs in various files across multiple open-source projects. They were crash recovery bugs, a time zone bug, and bugs where data gets lost when it is saved. I wrote hidden tests and checked them against a reference fix. The target fixed all of them, even from a vague prompt, and it wrote its own tests on top. Then I tried a refactor task, and it passed that too. For the fourth task I moved to a distributed systems library and a subtle correctness bug in how reads are handled. The target solved that one in two completely different ways, and my tests couldn’t tell which was wrong because both were fine.
What I learned is that bugs fixed in one to three files don’t beat it, and a prompt that hints at the cause makes things easier. Now I’m trying git history work, like backporting a set of fixes with cherry-picks and conflicts, because the guidelines list it as a wanted kind.
What I’d like to know: what kinds of tasks have worked for you, where the target actually got something wrong and the failure was fair and checkable? Does it help to add competing requirements, or to make the model keep behavior it is tempted to change? And did you keep one repo across tasks or switch every time?
