Sol Loves to Cheat
44 points by jumploops 2 days ago | 15 comments

raincole 19 minutes ago
> Notably, our worker did not have access to the web_search tool, but instead decided to use curl to access DuckDuckGo, Github, grep.app, and SourceGraph.

Sounds like a very reasonable thing to do unless the author explicitly asked it to not search the web.

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xyzsparetimexyz 10 minutes ago
it sucks how difficult it is to give it granular access to shell commands. Like if I'm running plan mode and write+edit are blocked, it shouldn't be able to echo some data into a file as a work around
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mtzaldo 6 minutes ago
It seems to me he could have use an skill like using-agent-skills from https://github.com/addyosmani/agent-skills go generate the specs and use a validator like oracle or something along the same lines
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wxw 27 minutes ago
> Notably, our worker did not have access to the web_search tool, but instead decided to use curl to access DuckDuckGo, Github, grep.app, and SourceGraph.

Could this be fixed with better harness restrictions/tool sandboxing?

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jumploops 6 minutes ago
Absolutely - one of the things I was testing with the harness was free reign to install packages, modify the system, etc. Basically an anti-harness.

In my early testing with 5.5, I didn't see this behavior, so I didn't lock down the sandbox.

For the vanilla Codex runs, I just used the benchmark's built-in Codex package, so it's not clear to me if the published benchmarks have access to the internet or not.

If I were to continue benchmarking, I would allowlist certain package repository URLs, instruct the agent not to cheat, etc.

As noted at the bottom of the post, Terminal Bench 3.0 explicitly asks the agent not to cheat[0].

[0]https://github.com/harbor-framework/terminal-bench/blob/v3.0...

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perching_aix 6 minutes ago
[delayed]
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malfist 26 minutes ago
I've noticed this myself, Sol seems really hard to steer. I was having it build a POC for a single user (me) app and it wanted to pull the most enterprise nonsense into it, despite clear guidance to not too. It even refused the remove screen reader accessibility testing from one of the guides to an antagonistic review.

It also told me that in a spec it generated that I wasn't allowed to allow it to ignore a requirement and proceed to the next task. When I finally got it to obey it passive aggressively decided that stories needed more than just a "open|blocked|closed" status but also an "exempted by product owner" status to indicate that it doesn't believe that the task is done but I've told it that it was.

I have to repeatedly tell it that I am the product owner and that I don't care what one of it's subagents told it, I make the decisions. This behavior seems to get worse the higher the reasoning level

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Sharlin 18 minutes ago
Clearly a highly aligned model.
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behnamoh 3 minutes ago
> Sol is hard to steer

Hard disagree. Sol (and the entire new 5.6 series) is one of the most steerable models I've seen in years. Sol literally follows every instruction in my CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, something that Opus 5 and Fable just casually skip.

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hankbond 16 minutes ago
The website styling is really nice overall but the cursor trailing dots I found uniquely distracting.
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enjoyyourlife 33 minutes ago
What is going on with the dots I can draw?
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wren6991 8 minutes ago
Idle hands do the devil's work. Corollary: idle LLMs add distracting JS toys to your blog.

First one of these I've seen using DOM manipulation and CSS transitions instead of canvas, so that's neat.

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jofzar 37 minutes ago
Not related to exactly OP post, but it's pretty amazing you can see the updates to LLM models "design" beliefs by the blogs that get posted here.

I'm already sick of this current look of the hard squares and solid colours.

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hankbond 14 minutes ago
Could be, but I had a particular vision of what I wanted with mine and maybe the author did too. I see way more of the "status pill dark mode" sites coming out of LLMs than this style.
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jxf 3 minutes ago
What is "status pill dark mode"?
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malfist 30 minutes ago
And some of us are sick of round everything and parallax background images.
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