Porting ALE to ALE-Gold: a deep dive into the pain of eval data and benchmarks
dejavucoder · x · 2026-10-12
dejavucoder shares a weekend-read recommendation: Sankalp's writeup on porting ALE to ALE-Gold, framed as essential reading for anyone into evals and benchmarks—or curious about the suffering involved.
Key sections from the table of contents:
- Porting the ALE Linux CLI subset to verifiers: what a rollout is, what porting took (minimizing rollout time, missing dependency specs), and full eval runs.
- Data quality auditing: underspecified task contracts and evaluator defects, answer leakage and network issues, broken inputs, missing/corrupt reference data.
- ALE-Gold evaluation results: Sol (xhigh) vs Luna (xhigh), selected task comparisons, failure modes, per-domain performance, plus a candid 'engineering has room for improvement' conclusion.
A hands-on postmortem of eval engineering, useful for anyone building agent benchmarks.
Related event: Porting ALE Benchmark Exposes Data Flaws in AI Evals(3 posts)→
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