It depends what you use as an anchor. If the anchor is a fixed model, you’re right. If the anchor is updated to a better model over time, then the elo of historical models degrades, right?

As far as I understand, this is exactly how ELO scores work. If a more capable show up and starts beating all the other models, it literally takes ELO points from everyone else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

Yes, that is in fact how Elo can work[0]. There are quite many ways Elo systems can work.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

Advantage for what exactly though? I'm not saying Elo Ranking doesn't give any information. It just doesn't give the information that the OP's project claims to be able to give: that models get nerfed over time. You could extract this kind of information from the raw results of each evaluation round between two models, ignoring any new model entries and compare these over time but not from the resulting Elo scores with an ever changing list of models.

New models are on average better than older models, the average skill of the population of models increases over time and so you are mathematically guaranteed that any existing model will over time degrade in Elo score even though it didn't change itself in any way.

It's like benchmarking a model against a list of challenges that over time are made more and more difficult and then claiming the model got nerfed because its score declined.

Elo is good at establishing an overall ranking order across models but that's not what this is about.

To detect nerfing of a model, projects like https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ are much much better (I'm not affiliated in any way).

Elo systems often include one or more ways new points can enter the system. The system used by the European Go Federation has three ways iirc: 1. Cannot go under 100, 2. Cannot lose more than 100 points in one tournament, 3. Weaker player beating a stronger one (which is countered by the stronger player beating the weaker one, but it's not balanced: if two people only play each other forever and ever, both of their Elos will grow).

> ELO ratings

Thank you, I just looked at the chart and said to myself: ELO? YOLO!

That Elo ranking is also called chess ranking

There's almost 0% chance that OpenAI doesn't quantize the model right off the bat.

I am willing to bet large amounts of money that OpenAI would never release a model served as fully BF16 in the year of our lord 2026. That would be insane operationally. They're almost certainly doing QAT to FP4 for FFN, and a similar or slightly larger quant for attention tensors.

webUIs have giant system prompts built in

APIs have much smaller ones

As phrased the only answer is the question; "as opposed to what?"

Arena only allows very small context sizes, so it's a noisy benchmark for what we care about IRL.

Better in what ways? I'm just curious about your experience.

It was often much faster, and when I revisited the code later, there were cases where I realized it had moved the implementation toward a better abstraction.

I should also add that I am not claiming to be a particularly great programmer. I have never worked at FAANG, and I haven't had much exposure to the kind of massive codebases those engineers deal with every day.

Most of the code I've worked with comes from Korean and Chinese startups, industrial contractors, or older corporate research-lab environments. So I know my frame of reference is limited.

When I write code, I usually rely on fairly conservative patterns: Result-style error handling instead of throwing exceptions through business logic, aggressive use of guard clauses, small policy/strategy objects, and adapters at I/O boundaries. I also prefer placing a normalization layer before analysis and building pure transformation pipelines wherever possible.

So when Codex produced a design that decoupled the messy input adapter from the stable normalized data, and then separated that from the analyzer, it wasn't just 'fancier code.' It aligned perfectly with the architectural direction I already value, but it pushed the boundaries of that design further than I would have initially done myself.

This is exactly why I hesitate to dismiss code as 'bad' just because I don't immediately understand it. Sometimes, it really is just bad code. But sometimes, the abstraction is simply a bit ahead of my current local mental model, and I only grasp its true value after a second or third requirement is introduced.

To be completely honest, using AI has caused a significant drop in my programming confidence. Since AI is ultimately trained on codebases written by top-tier programmers, its output essentially represents the average of those top developers—or perhaps slightly below their absolute peak.

I often find myself realizing that the code I write by hand simply cannot beat it