A verification loop 4x'd DeepSeek's intelligence, matching Opus at 1/7 the cost
Comments
bel8
_aavaa_
Seems interesting, but buried under a mountain of written slop.
rightbyte
It is marketing for some SaaS thing. However, I think something like this, "verification loops with some sort of tricks", is what Anthropic and "OpenAI" do behind the scene with their interfaces.
sozal
Fair on the length. The verification loop took DeepSeek from ~20 to ~80 on Web-Bench, matching Opus at ~7x less cost. Curious if the method holds up for you.
_aavaa_
Well I don’t know what the method is, there’s a mention of ironbee, but I’m not willing to spend the time digging through this to figure out what’s needed and how to set it up.
alexgoodhart
You could literally send it to an ai
subscribed
Absolutely not.
If someone vomits the slop that must be fed to a robot to make sense of it, even if there's something of value.
It's just so rude, like a professor entering the class, emptying a carton box full of papers on the floor, flipping a bird and leaving without a word.
It's possible there's something good in it.
sozal
Zero engagement with anything the post actually says. You've spent more words performing your distaste than it would've taken to read the thing. Recycling slop as a catch all for "I didn't read it" is the real content free contribution here.
subscribed
LOL, you could at least write your comments yourself.
I said I didn't read (so much for the big gitcha) because if its not designed for human consumption that means it's not worth human time.
I bet someone actually respecting their audience will present findings in a way that's.... palatable, for the lack of the better word.
(I spent some time commenting to add a voice of disagreement for enshittification of the publishing part of the internet. I'm entitled to it as much as you feel entitled to posting your comments)
_aavaa_
Or the people writing this could spend more effort to make it not slop. If they can’t be bothered, I won’t waste my time figuring out if this is worth it, there’s are 1000 other articles to read and techniques to try.
And if this is worth a look, I’m sure I’ll hear about it again from someone who wrote it better.
sozal
Or just don't read the blog post and stop posting your slop here so everyone will be happy
neetle
Expressing some frustration with the authors lack of consideration when announcing something is fairly natural, tbh.
Posts like this break the social contract, and honestly show a lack of both care and consideration for communicating the subject matter AND a flagrant disrespect for anyone who would consume this.
I’m sure there are some good ideas here, but it’s hard to sift through the lack of applied ai and lack of communication skills to get to them
sozal
[dead]
subscribed
If you can't take a constructive critique of something you posted..... maybe don't post so you'll remain happy?
I hope you can take your own advice?
Take care!
sozal
@neetle I get the frustration, but reaching for "slop" as the default reaction to anything you find too long isn't all that natural. Happy to hear specific feedback on what didn't land, that's more useful to me than the label.
_aavaa_
I'm not calling it slop because it's long. I'm calling it slop because it's poorly written and reeks of AI with no editing.
Instead of
> Is the loop just more attempts? One objection deserves an answer up front. A verification loop spends extra inference per task, so is the lift just a bigger compute budget in disguise? Partly it has to be. The loop does more work. But the retries the benchmark grants are blind: the model sees a failure signal and guesses again. The loop’s iterations are guided by evidence from the running application, which is a different kind of attempt, not just another one. Whether guided iteration beats an equal budget of blind retries at matched cost is exactly the ablation this framing demands, and it is planned for a future post: DeepSeek alone with a larger retry budget, against DeepSeek with the loop, dollar for dollar. Until that runs, read the results below with this open question in mind.
It could have been
> These loops are not just retries. Each iteration provides the model with evidence from the previous run. Some of the uplift may come from the extra tokens, so a follow-up post will compare the guided loop against cost-matched blind retries.
We can argue over exact wording, but the original is far too long.
Or the point about "measuring cost honestly". It's not clear why you wouldn't be using the published rates and do the basic multiplication yourself. There's nothing subtle about this, and it doesn't need to a whole paragraph.
sozal
@subscribed To make a critique, first you must READ. Otherwise, your comments will be slop
subscribed
Its enough to skim far enough to see it's just slop.
I don't need to eat entire bowl of the burnt soup with flys floating in it to know its a burnt soup with insects in it.
scotty79
> I’m not willing to spend the time digging through this to figure out what’s needed
That's the neat part. You don't... need to do this yourself nowadays. AI agent is perfectly capable to figure out any new open source thing that pops up daily now. You can just give it the link to the repo and say "Set this up for me. I wanna play with it."
verdverm
until you realize people are putting malicous instructions in the projects now, at least a few anti-Ai coders see this as an act of defiance
From what I understood, the gist of it is that uses a bunch of skills in a loop to help LLMs solve the tasks better via browser-testing, debugging, visual-testing, etc..
The skills can be found here:
https://github.com/ironbee-ai/ironbee-devtools-skills/tree/m...
Question that was left unanswered:
How much longer does a 4x DeepSkeep loop took compared to Opus?