Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

Post by giancarlostoro » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:37 PM UTC

ksenzee wrote: post #245

giancarlostoro wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Calling sort is far easier than understanding the algorithm for example. This was one of my gripes in college, why am I implementing something if I just need to understand what it does? I'm going to use the built-in version anyway.

The problem is that a computer science degree isn't the right training for most software engineering jobs.

Post by shakna » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:03 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #331

ksenzee wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that a computer science degree isn't the right training for most software engineering jobs.

My degree was not specifically CS, it was a related degree, the focus was on landing jobs, but they still covered some CS concepts because some students were in fact doing a CS degree. I was more focused on show me what I need to build things. I have never had to hand-craft any algorithm in my 15 years of coding, it just makes no sense to me. Someone else figured it out, I'm contempt understanding the algorithms.

Post by kevinday » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

raphaelj wrote: post #168

languid-photic wrote: post #66

Naively tested a set of agents on this task. Each ran the same spec headlessly in their native harness (one shot). Results: Agent Cycles Time ───────────────────────────────────────────── gpt-5-2 2,124 16m claude-opus-4-5-20251101 4,973 1h 2m gpt-5-1-codex-max-xhigh 5,402 34m gpt-5-codex 5,486 7m gpt-5-1-codex 12,453 8m gpt-5-2-codex 12,905 6m gpt-5-1-codex-mini 17,480 7m claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929 21,054 10m claude-…

Could you try with some open-weighted models, e.g. Qwen3-coder, GLM-4.7 or Devstral-2?

Post by amirhirsch » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:25 PM UTC

lalaland1125 wrote: post #298

amirhirsch wrote: post #293

I'm at 1137 with one hour with opus now... Pipelined vectorized hash, speculation, static code for each stage, epilogues and prologues for each stage-to-stage... I think I'm going to get sub 900 since i just realized i can in-parallel compute whether stage 5 of the hash is odd just by looking at bits 16 and 0 of stage 4 with less delay.....

How do you avoid the load bottleneck?

   0  |    1   | 1 broadcast → all 256 items

   1  |    2   | 2 broadcasts → groups

   2  |    4   | 4 broadcasts → groups

   3  |    8   | 8 broadcasts → groups

   4  |   16   | 16 broadcasts → groups

   5  |   32   | 32 broadcasts → groups

   6  |   63   | 63 loads (sparse, use indirection)

   7  |  108   | 108 loads (sparse, use indirection)

   8  |  159   | 159 loads (sparse, use indirection)

   9  |  191   | 191 loads (sparse, use indirection)

  10  |  224   | 224 loads (sparse, use indirection)

  11  |    1   | 1 broadcast → all 256 items

  12  |    2   | 2 broadcasts → groups

  13  |    4   | 4 broadcasts → groups

  14  |    8   | 8 broadcasts → groups

  15  |   16   | 16 broadcasts → groups

Post by Aurornis » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #308

Aurornis wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I generally have a policy of "over 4 hours and I charge for my time. Worth mentioning that demanding to be paid to apply for a company is usually equivalent to rejecting the job. Most companies are going to end the interview there. Few HR departments would allow one applicant to be paid for the same interview loop as other candidates. I was helping out in a mentoring program during the ZIRP period when the idea of…

Yeah, I have told HR people this and been rejected. I do say this upfront because I don't want to send you a surprise bill. The main response I get is "OK, that's fine, don't spend more than 4 hours on it." The Anthropic recruiter told me, "no problem, it's a 4-hour test anyway."