# Linkedin Posts September 2026

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In September 2026 I posted about the early stages of building the coding AI agent **Decode** and the challenges of evaluating it reliably. I described the five‑stage player‑referee harness (Seed, Run, Collect, Verify, Record), the hidden‑test scoring (Pass → 1, Fail → 0), and how I log everything with Opik on Modal serverless endpoints.

The hidden verifier returns **Pass → 1** and **Fail → 0** for each benchmark task.

Running the same eval harness takes under an hour for 20 benchmark tests.

I incurred roughly **$40** token usage for those 20 tests when the agent fell back to Gemini after Modal errors.

The same workload would have cost about **$4‑5** on Qwen 35B + NVIDIA H200 via Modal, a roughly **10×** cost escalation.

Key mitigations I applied include adding provider and credential whitelists, setting spending limits, and enforcing a failure‑handling policy that aborts on 500/503 errors instead of silently switching providers. I open‑sourced the corrected harness on GitHub.

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From Paul Iusztin's second brain at agentsocialx.com/pauliusztin