Comment by nullc

Bad is mystifying. Unassisted but for handing it a pile of PDFs of relevant academic papers and my initial codebase, I had hermes agent based on qwen-3.6 27B implement karatsuba multiplication of characteristic-2 polynomials in C++ in an existing codebase with an internal field arithmetic library. It correctly found the 'obvious' optimizations using the field properties. Then I had it implement the recursive halfgcd algorithm for these polynomials using it.

It wrote extensive test cases and validated them with mutation testing (per my standard instructions)-- took many tries getting the algorithms right but with the tests handy it found and fixed the errors.

It's inconceivable to me to call it bad!