One lesson of running botsbench.com, in a slightly different domain, is to measure for model contamination every time.
How does that work?
My gut feeling is that any serious real-world company with a proprietary codebase worth looking at would not be handing out the crown jewels to a third party. License or not.
I don't doubt somebody licensed their codebase to them, I just have my doubts about who the "who" could be.
At any rate, I'm not sure it matters whose codebase it is. I'd even say that a shitty codebase might make for a better test.
"Model X performed great, but we can't possibly tell you anything about the code it was looking at apart from it was a large code base from an unknown company".
So basically pinky-promise benchmarking ?
I'm not sure I follow the value here ?
But then if we take that argument to its natural extreme, surely it means people should take the marketing bullshit published in the 100-page system cards published by Anthropic & co as "valuable" too ?
But even so, pretty much yes: companies that actually have reliable and accurate info in their releases get trusted more. It takes time because the default is to disbelieve info from biased sources, but it is possible to trust some of them more than others.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/terminalbench-v4-0
There's only two or three sane options here - you can easily try them all and pick yourself.
Try and use gemini 3.8 yourself for any real world work and you'll see it's terrible. It'll just go in circles reading the same file 20 times for no reason making hundreds of tool calls for a simple change.