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The software-engineering loop

How often does this portfolio report a negative or mixed result?

research/swe-nullrate

How often does this portfolio report a negative or mixed result? In an 80-summary hand-labelled sample, 59% of the summaries that test a claim against an alternative (43–73%) report a negative or mixed result (preliminary, one labeller).

7 tests

What it found

A hand-labelled census of 80 randomly sampled project summaries (of 711): 51% descriptive, 20% positive, 18% mixed and 11% negative. Among the 39 that test a claim against an alternative, 59% (Wilson 95% 43–73%) report a negative or mixed result, so the portfolio is not a list of wins. A keyword rule for negative or mixed has precision 0.60 and recall 0.65 in-sample and should not be used for by-theme shares. Preliminary: one labeller, one pass, rubric fixed while labelling, summaries truncated when long, no inter-rater agreement.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/swe-nullrate: headline_types
swe-nullrate/experiments/headline_types.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.