AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

Well, if the evaluation infrastructure is something humans could have had access to before, and that the agents key "skill" is just that it's a more patient and scalable worker, I would still argue that this "comes from the agent".

Humans get bored, inpatient, or run out of time, and so often give up in what they perceive to be a decent "local minima". Early verification harnesses using gpt-4 for optimizing robot reward functions succeeded quite well on the fact that the LLM just kept going (link below). As long as it is too boring for a human to use the same evaluation infrastructure, this is still an agent skill.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12931

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#6

Post by pingou » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

AI improving itself (or at least the architecture it runs on), the singularity is near as they say.

Do we have other examples of AI being used to improve the LLMs, apart for the creation of synthetic data and the testing of the models?

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#7

Post by maxothex » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

What I'm most curious about is how this translates to messy, real-world codebases without well-defined metrics. Most production software isn't chip design or kernel optimization - it's business logic with unclear success criteria. The infrastructure story is impressive, but I'd love to see how they handle domains where the evaluation function itself is ambiguous.

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#8

Post by baq » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

RSI is here on the hardware level and on software level. Sprinkle with a couple algorithmic breakthroughs and results are nigh unimaginable.

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#9

Post by alecco » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

Are Googlers themselves happy using Gemini coding agent instead of Claude Code or Codex? (no snark, I'm really asking)

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#10

Post by carbocation » Thu, May 07, 2026, 4:04 PM UTC

alecco wrote: post #9

Are Googlers themselves happy using Gemini coding agent instead of Claude Code or Codex? (no snark, I'm really asking)

Last month, Steve Yegge suggested that they are not: https://xcancel.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2043747998740689171