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576 points Gricha | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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postalcoder ◴[] No.46233143[source]
One of my favorite personal evals for llms is testing its stability as a reviewer.

The basic gist of it is to give the llm some code to review and have it assign a grade multiple times. How much variance is there in the grade?

Then, prompt the same llm to be a "critical" reviewer with the same code multiple times. How much does that average critical grade change?

A low variance of grades across many generations and a low delta between "review this code" and "review this code with a critical eye" is a major positive signal for quality.

I've found that gpt-5.1 produces remarkably stable evaluations whereas Claude is all over the place. Furthermore, Claude will completely [and comically] change the tenor of its evaluation when asked to be critical whereas gpt-5.1 is directionally the same while tightening the screws.

You could also interpret these results to be a proxy for obsequiousness.

Edit: One major part of the eval i left out is "can an llm converge on an 'A'?" Let's say the llm gives the code a 6/10 (or B-). When you implement its suggestions and then provide the improved code in a new context, does the grade go up? Furthermore, can it eventually give itself an A, and consistently?

It's honestly impressive how good, stable, and convergent gpt-5.1 is. Claude is not great. I have yet to test it on Gemini 3.

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adastra22 ◴[] No.46233975[source]
You mean literally assign a grade, like B+? This is unlikely to work based on how token prediction & temperature works. You're going to get a probability distribution in the end that is reflective of the model runtime parameters, not the intelligence of the model.
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1. postalcoder ◴[] No.46241773[source]
the gpt-5 reasoning models do not have a configurable temperature.

There's a reason why reasoning models are bad for creative writing. The thinking constrains the output.