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Congrats to the Kaggle Benchmarking Challenge Winners!

Jem on November 05, 2026

A few weeks ago we teamed up with Kaggle to ask a deceptively simple question: how do you actually know whether a model is any good at the work you...
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Fayaz • • Edited

Congrats to the winners. 🏆🎉

This is one of the few DEV challenges that I regret not being able to join myself. Not enough time!
I'd still love to go through the submissions and complete the challenge on my own pace, when I get time 🙏

So, congrats to everyone who participated! 🥰
And thanks to Kaggle and DEV for arranging such challenges.

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Nazar Boyko •

Thanks a lot, DEV team and Kaggle! This was such a fun one to build. Congrats to everyone who took part! 🙌

@jonathansolvesstuff The Calgary time zone one made me laugh and then double-check my own assumptions 😄

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JonathanSolvesProblems •

Thanks a bunch Nazar, congrats on yours too! Clocks went back in a lot of places on Sunday, not Calgary, and all 19 models still have it on standard time 😎

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Nazar Boyko •

At this point the models aren't wrong, they’re just loyal to old Calgary 😅😅😅

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JonathanSolvesProblems •

Ahahaha, true that!

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JonathanSolvesProblems •

Thanks a bunch DEV team and Kaggle, super appreciate it! Congrats to the other four winners too, really nice seeing everyone test the models against something real.

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xulingfeng •

Congrats All!

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Amy Hudspith •

Congrats folks!

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Giorgi Kobaidze •

Congrats to the winners! Great job, absolutely well deserved!👏

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Varshith V Hegde •

Congratulations!!! to all the winners ....

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artespraticas •

Congrats to all winners; my pleasure to participate and learn!

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Soumyadeep Dey •

Nice Congratulations 🎉 😔 @heyitsjem

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nyaomaru •

Congrats to all the winners!! 😸🍾🎉

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Paul Lovelace •

The Calgary one is my favourite — 19 out of 19 models getting the time zone wrong because Alberta stopped changing its clocks is exactly the kind of failure a leaderboard would never catch. And the Ariane 5 rebuild flagging SQL injection in code that never touches a database... that's the test-writing instinct I wish more evals had. Do any of the winners plan to keep their benchmarks running as new models ship, or was this a one-shot?

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Jessica Doering •

Congrats winners! Great job everyone!

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Sohee Lee • • Edited

Congrats to the Winners! 👏🎉

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Chauhan Balaji •

congrats to all winners. 🎉

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Dan •

Congratulations on your winning endeavors .😁

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Ethan Carter •

Congrats to the winners. 🏆🎉

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Hemapriya Kanagala •

Big congrats to all the winners 😀

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Earl Grey •

Congratulations to all the winners 🏆 👏 🙌

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Jean-Sebastien Beaulieu •

congrat to all winner

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Oleksandr •

Starting from a specific, known-hard problem is the best way to build a benchmark. The VeriFactu invoice ledger example alone shows how much more practical these are compared to generic leaderboards. Huge congratulations to all the winners!

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Kürşat Yılmaz •

The obsession with wrapping remote APIs into multi-layered agent abstractions is creating massive hidden latency and failure cascades in production.

If you profile real-world workloads, bare-metal local inference (via direct C++ / llama.cpp or vLLM bindings) consistently beats fragile cloud wrappers on both predictability and cost. Tooling should eliminate abstraction penalties, not compound them.

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Peter •

Testing models against real mess instead of clean leaderboards is so real. Over at The Printing World, we see this when automated inventory systems try to guess real-world stock. Huge congrats to the winners!