Coverage on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

The Models Were Different. Their Mistakes Weren't

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:00:24 +0100

Part 5 — More Intelligence Is Not Automatically Better

Seven repairs, one unresolved bug

Open on the stubborn task, before any percentage. The problem statement asks for a function that returns the mean of the list it is given, on every call. The starter code caches its first answer and never lets go:

def average(xs):
    if not hasattr(average, '_n'):
        average._n = len(xs)
        average._s = sum(xs)
    return average._s / average._n

The reference repair is one line: return sum(xs) / len(xs). Delete the state.

Make the Problems Harder

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:00:25 +0100

Part 5 — More Intelligence Is Not Automatically Better

Three tasks the baseline never solved

Chapter 24 ended under a ceiling: eleven of twelve tasks solved by a single draw, one shared failure, nowhere for a portfolio to go. The response was a harder corpus: forty repair tasks in four strata of ten, each stated as misbehavior plus a contract rather than a fault label, with hidden tests defining correctness. On that ground the arms finally differ. Lead with the paired difference, not the percentages: ¹ ²