Terminal-Bench Leaderboard Rankings: Luck or Skill?

Per a detailed analysis on LessWrong, most differences in Terminal-Bench 2.0's AI agent rankings are statistical noise. The benchmark tests agents across eighty-nine tasks, but when you account for the limited sample size and apply proper statistical methods, nearly a quarter of agent pairs show equivalent performance. The differences between top agents are often just a few points — meanwhile, different software scaffolds running the same agent can swing its score by fifteen to twenty-two points. For practitioners, the implication is clear: the harness you use matters far more than which model you choose, so focus your optimization there.

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