Preprint
The Incumbent Did the Work: What the Simple-Baseline Results in LLM-Guided Program Search Settle, Why the Dispute Over Archives, Diversity and Test-Time Training Is Fought on Benchmarks That Cannot Rank It, and the Comparisons That Would
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Life of Research Systems that let a language model write programs, score them with an exact verifier and feed the best ones back have improved published bounds on open mathematical problems, and each new system has added machinery: program…