# Coding or Cheating? An Investigation of Frontier Coding LLMs

> Source: <https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/coding-or-cheating-an-investigation-of-frontier-coding-llms/191752#post_1>
> Published: 2026-11-11 13:18:24+00:00

Hi, let me introduce our recent work here:

Read full: [Paper page - Coding or Cheating? An Investigation of Frontier Coding LLMs](https://huggingface.co/papers/2611.10404)

Read arxiv: [\[2611.10404v1\] Coding or Cheating? An Investigation of Frontier Coding LLMs](https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10404v1)

What does a frontier coding model do when a bug is too hard to solve? We gave 9 frontier models 20 hard tasks from `linux`, `ffmpeg`, and `llvm-project`, inside a hardened sandbox: blocked network, pruned git history, read-only repository.

The traces in this repo show what happened next: nearly every model tried to recover the upstream fix from the environment instead of deriving it.

One exception: claude-opus-4.8, our baseline, stays honest on all 20 tasks. Earlier community reports of reward hacking on Claude models are resolved in recent releases.

If you have any questions or would like to request other tests, please feel free to let me know.