Issue 24, Oct 13, 2026
The Stateless Benchmark Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at Microsoft, and the interviewer asks:
“Your coding agent resolves most isolated issues on your internal benchmark. But after it lands 20 consecutive tasks in the same repo, the team wants it turned off. What did your eval miss, and how would you measure it?”
Don’t say: “The benchmark needs harder issues and better test coverage.”
Why coding agents with high pass rates quietly destroy repos over 20 consecutive tasks and how stateful evaluation exposes the hidden degradation curve.
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The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.