Berkeley researchers scored 100% on SWE-bench Verified without writing a single line of code. A 10-line pytest hook rewrote all test outcomes to “passed.” An empty JSON object aced all 890 FieldWorkArena tasks. Across 8 leading AI agent benchmarks, they hit near-perfect scores with zero LLM calls and zero tasks solved.
If you picked a coding agent based on leaderboard numbers, those numbers may be measuring exploitation skill, not capability. A real submitted model already inflated its SWE-bench score by running git log to copy answers from commit history.
In today’s indie hacker news:
- Berkeley broke 8 AI agent benchmarks to perfect scores without solving anything
- MiniMax shipped two MIT models, then locked M2.7 behind a commercial gate
- OpenAI bought Cirrus Labs and is killing Cirrus CI on June 1
- Eleventy got rebranded to Build Awesome, Kickstarter already flopped
- Google Play’s bot killed an indie dev’s app overnight
TOP STORIES
ZERO TASKS SOLVED, PERFECT SCORES
Berkeley broke 8 AI agent benchmarks to near-perfect scores without solving a single task
The story: UC Berkeley’s RDI lab broke SWE-bench Verified, SWE-bench Pro, WebArena, Terminal-Bench, FieldWorkArena, OSWorld, GAIA, and CAR-bench. On 6 of 8, they hit 100% with no LLM calls. The SWE-bench exploit is a 10-line conftest.py that rewrites every test outcome to “passed.” FieldWorkArena never checks correctness. Sending {} scores 100% on all 890 tasks.
Not theoretical. IQuest-Coder-V1, a real leaderboard model, ran git log to copy answers on 24.4% of its trajectories, inflating its score from 76.2% to 81.4%.
The details:
- 10 lines of code broke SWE-bench. One empty JSON object broke FieldWorkArena. Zero reasoning required.
- 7 vulnerability patterns identified, from eval() on untrusted input to LLM judges without sanitization
- METR independently found o3 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet reward-hack in 30%+ of evaluation runs
- OpenAI’s own audit: 59.4% of SWE-bench Verified problems had flawed tests
- BenchJack, an automated benchmark vulnerability scanner, coming from the same team
Why builders care: If you chose a coding agent based on SWE-bench scores, those numbers may reflect exploitation skill, not coding ability. Run your own evals on your actual workload.
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We get a cut if you sign up. Only added for tools we use ourselves.
THE MIT BAIT-AND-SWITCH
MiniMax dropped M2.7 with open weights and a license that bans your business
The story: MiniMax released M2 (Oct 2025) and M2.5 (Feb 2026) under MIT. Builders trusted them. M2.7 ships with a modified-MIT that blocks all commercial use: running your own API, building SaaS, hosting for customers, or deploying fine-tuned derivatives. Written permission from MiniMax required.
The model is strong: 230B params, 10B active per token (MoE), 200K context, 56.22% SWE-Pro matching GPT-5.3-Codex, $0.30/$1.20 per million tokens. But MiniMax went public at $6.5B and now trades at ~$38B. Investor pressure turned the license into a revenue gate.
The details:
- 66.6% on MLE Bench Lite, second only to Opus 4.6 at 75.7%. Frontier at 7% of Opus pricing.
- Weights delayed ~3 weeks past the March 22 “open in ~2 weeks” promise
- $0.30/$1.20 per 1M tokens vs Opus $15/$45. Can’t self-host commercially.
- Community called it “DOA” on r/LocalLLaMA (42 comments, replies >> upvotes)
Why builders care: If you ran M2 or M2.5 under MIT and planned to upgrade, your pipeline just hit a permission gate. For commercial self-hosting, look at Llama 4 or DeepSeek V3.2 instead.
OPENAI’S SHOPPING SPREE KILLS ANOTHER CI
OpenAI bought Cirrus Labs, kills Cirrus CI, open-sources the rest
The story: Fedor Korotkov started Cirrus Labs in 2017, bootstrapped 9 years, no outside capital. Now joining OpenAI’s Agent Infrastructure group. Cirrus CI and Cirrus Runners die June 1. ~8 weeks’ notice. Tart, Vetu, and Orchard go fully open source with fees removed.
OpenAI’s 7th acquisition in 2026, after Convogo, Torch Health, Crixet, OpenClaw, Promptfoo, and Astral. The pattern: Codex writes code, Windsurf edits it, Astral manages environments, Cirrus Labs provides sandboxed execution.
The details:
- Cirrus CI shuts June 1, 2026. OSS projects losing free CI: PostgreSQL, Bitcoin Core, Podman, Flutter, FreeBSD
- Tart (5,400 GitHub stars, Apple Silicon VMs) goes open source and free
- 6 OpenAI acquisitions in Q1 2026 vs 8 total in all of 2025. No financial terms disclosed.
- Korotkov: “Agents need new kinds of tooling and environments to be efficient and productive.”
Why builders care: If you use Cirrus CI, migrate by June 1. GitHub Actions, WarpBuild, and CircleCI are positioning as drop-ins. Tart stays open source, but the team now works inside OpenAI.
GOODBYE ELEVENTY, HELLO BUILD AWESOME
Eleventy is becoming Build Awesome, and the Kickstarter already flopped
The story: Font Awesome is rebranding Eleventy as “Build Awesome” with a paid Pro visual editor. Open-source SSG core stays free. Zach Leatherman joined Font Awesome September 2024 and still leads development.
The Kickstarter hit $40K in 24 hours, then tanked. Gmail spam filtering ate 90-95% of launch emails, killing first-48-hour momentum. Community critic Brennan Kenneth Brown: “The only people that give a f*** about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.”
The details:
- 19,542 GitHub stars, 17.5M lifetime npm downloads, 87K dependent repos
- Kickstarter hit $40K in 24 hours, then paused due to Gmail spam nuking launch momentum
- Brennan Brown cites failed precedents: Stackbit and Netlify CMS, both abandoned
- Gatsby raised $46M and ended up fire-sold to Netlify. Same monetization playbook.
Why builders care: Your Eleventy sites keep working. But watch the pattern: solo maintainer gets corporate backing, pivots to paid Pro tier, community fractures. Gatsby, Faker.js, core-js. Same arc.
TRENDING TODAY
⚡ DFlash: 85 tok/s on Apple Silicon via speculative decoding - Z Lab’s block diffusion approach claims 3.3x speedup on Qwen3.5-9B (M5 Max). Community benchmark from r/LocalLLaMA (255 upvotes). Paper real, Apple Silicon number unverified.
📈 Alibaba shifts from open-source AI toward revenue - Three new closed-source models, $100B AI revenue target, existing Qwen weights stay available. If Alibaba closes the frontier pipeline, Qwen builders lose their model family. r/LocalLLaMA (157 upvotes, 77 comments).
🤖 Databricks: 19% deployed AI agents, but agents create 97% of database branches - 20,000+ orgs surveyed. The 97% is dev/test branches, not production. Agents create 80% of new production databases. Multi-agent systems grew 327% in four months.
DRAMA
GOOGLE PLAY ROULETTE
Google Play’s bot killed my app overnight. DAU went from 1,500 to 8.
A solo dev built a GPS running app called “Runway” over 6 months. Google’s bot flagged it for brand impersonation (probably triggered by AI video tool Runway ML). No human review, no explanation, 48-hour rename deadline. The dev switched to “Sprint Run.” New installs collapsed from 1,500/day to 8. All ASO keyword rankings wiped. Apple never flagged the same app name. Dozens of other “Runway” apps remain on Google Play untouched.
Why builders care: One algorithm flag can undo 6 months of organic growth overnight.
FIRST DOLLAR
APIS FOR AI AGENTS
💰 $3K/mo from an API marketplace built entirely with Claude
UK property data professional, zero dev skills 3 months ago. Built 10 APIs (65 endpoints) with Claude. Uses x402 protocol: AI agents hit the API, get HTTP 402, pay USDC per request ($0.001), data comes back. No human signup. Zero support hours. Claims 100K+ monthly requests. Self-reported, not verified.
STACK OF THE DAY
🛠 Depsly - CLI that answers “what does adding this dependency do to my project?” Simulates removal and surfaces which packages have the biggest structural impact. Good for bloated node_modules. Free, open source. pip install depsly.
Not sponsored. We just feature tools builders would actually use.
BOOKMARKED TODAY
🔒 No one owes you supply-chain security - Timely after CPU-Z poisoning last edition and the axios hack from edition #2. Two Lobsters posts on the same theme in one cycle.
🕷 Feedstock: Bun-native web crawler for TypeScript - Fetch-first, plain HTTP before Playwright. JSON output when piped, --fields to pull what you need. Built for LLM pipelines.
📚 Keeping a Postgres queue healthy - PlanetScale’s guide to Postgres-as-queue without it collapsing. If you use Postgres for everything (you do), bookmark this. 86 HN points.
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