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Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

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Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#81

Post by ithkuil »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #37
nice_byte wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 being cryptic and poorly specified is part of the assignment just like real code in fact, it's _still_ better documented an self contained than most of the problems you'd usually encounter in the wild. pulling on a thread to end up with a clear picture of what needs to be accomplished is like 90% of the job very often.

I didn't see much cryptic except having to click on "perf_takehome.py" without being told to. But, 2 hours didn't seem like much to bring the sample code into some kind of test environment, debug it enough to works out details of its behaviour, read through the reference kernel and get some idea of what the algorithm is doing, read through the simulator to understand the VM instruction set, understand the test harnes…

My instinct to read about the problem was to open the "problem.py" file, which states "Read the top of perf_takehome.py for more introduction"

So yeah. They _could_ have written it much more clearly in the readme.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#82

Post by forgotpwd16 »

sureglymop wrote: post #24

Having recently learned more about SIMD, PTX and optimization techniques, this is a nice little challenge to learn even more. As a take home assignment though I would have failed as I would have probably taken 2 hours to just sketch out ideas and more on my tablet while reading the code before even changing it.

Unless misread, 2 hours isn't the time limit for the candidate to do this but the time Claude eventually needed to outperform best returned solution. Best candidate could've taken 6h~2d to achieve this result.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#83

Post by maerch »

riffraff wrote: post #46
tucnak wrote: post #25

The snarky writing of "if you beat our best solution, send us an email and MAYBE we think about interviewing you" is really something, innit?

I feel that came out wrong but the "maybe" was intended to be a way of saying "no guarantees", to avoid giving people the idea "solve this, get hired".

In that case, removing „perhaps“ would have helped a lot. It is not about maybe being hired, but about maybe being interviewed.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#84

Post by lovich »

andruby wrote: post #79
lovich wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That paraphrases to "do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you" It sounds incredibly condescending, if not snarky, but I would classify those adjectives as mostly synonymous.

I understand how it can be interpreted as snarky, but how could it have been written better? It's a hard path to walk and recruiting/interviewing is inherently sensitive it seems.

The original

>If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.

Not condescending

> If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code so we can schedule an interview.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#85

Post by pvalue005 »

bird0861 wrote: post #68
pvalue005 wrote: post #27

I suspect this was released by Anthropic as a DDOS attack on other AI companies. I prompted 'how do we solve this challenge?' into gemini cli in a cloned repo and it's been running non-stop for 20 minutes :)

Which Gemini model did you use? My experience since launch of G3Pro has been that it absolutely sucks dog crap through a coffee straw.

/model: Auto (Gemini 3) Let Gemini CLI decide the best model for the task: gemini-3-pro, gemini-3-flash

After ~40 minutes, it got to:

The final result is 2799 cycles, a 52x speedup over the baseline. I successfully implemented Register Residency, Loop Unrolling, and optimized Index Updates to achieve this, passing all correctness and baseline speedup tests. While I didn't beat the Opus benchmarks due to the complexity of Broadcast Optimization hazards, the performance gain is substantial.

It's impressive as I definitely won't be able to do what it did. I don't know most of the optimization techniques it listed there.

I think it's over. I can't compete with coding agents now. Fortunately I've saved enough to buy some 10 acre farm in Oregon and start learning to grow some veggies and raise chickens.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#86

Post by kitrak95 »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #78
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 make a repo with solutions given by each model inside a dir/branch for comparison?

Are you giving instructions to a stranger on the internet?

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#87

Post by bjackman »

pvalue005 wrote: post #27

I suspect this was released by Anthropic as a DDOS attack on other AI companies. I prompted 'how do we solve this challenge?' into gemini cli in a cloned repo and it's been running non-stop for 20 minutes :)

Lately with Gemini CLI / Jules it doesn't seem like time spent is a good proxy for difficulty. It has a big problem with getting into loops of "I am preparing the response for the user. I am done. I will output the answer. I am confident. Etc etc".

I see this directly in Gemini CLI as the harness detects loops and bails the reasoning. But I've also just occasionally seen it take 15m+ to do trivial stuff and I suspect that's a symptom of a similar issue.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#88

Post by wiseowise »

jackblemming wrote: post #34
margalabargala wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transitively, you haven't thought the most thoughts or cared the most about anything, therefore we should disregard what you think and care about?

The person replying was trying to turn the conversation into some sort of IQ pissing contest. Not sure why, that seems like their own problem. I was reminding them that there is always someone smarter.

Your comment history is littered with “nerds”, “elite”, “better” and all sorts of comparisons.

> I was reminding them that there is always someone smarter.

And even with this comment you literally do not understand that you have some skewed view of the world. Do you have some high school trauma?

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#90

Post by efilife »

sealeck wrote: post #23
zeroCalories wrote: post #16

It shocks me that anyone supposedly good enough for anthropic would subject themselves to such a one sided waste of time.

Why is writing code to execute a program using the fewest instructions possible on a virtual machine a waste of time?

you don't get paid for it
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