My Twitter feed recently got taken over by people grinding this "retired" Anthropic performance take-home, and I finally got nerd-sniped into it.
Anthropic made it public because Claude Opus 4.5 effectively "broke" it, beating top candidates in under 2 hours. But while the AI can spit out the answer, I wanted to understand the mechanics under the hood. And AI-generated solutions carry 0 educational value.
So in the post I dug into every single detail of the accelerator architecture to see exactly where the bottlenecks were.
I cover the 3 main optimizations that took my solution from a released baseline to a 65x speedup.
It’s a deep dive, but I wrote it to be accessible. Even if you don't do low-level optimization, I’ve included visualizations to explain SIMD, VLIW, and everything — you'll enjoy it!
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The "retirement" of a take-home is a warning sign for hiring, though. This test was retired because Opus crushed it. As we look toward Opus 5 likely solving even harder problems in 4 hours... what does a "good" take-home exam look like in 2026? How would you test the candidates?
What specific signals should we be testing for, and how do you design a task to capture that?
seeall•1h ago
My Twitter feed recently got taken over by people grinding this "retired" Anthropic performance take-home, and I finally got nerd-sniped into it.
Anthropic made it public because Claude Opus 4.5 effectively "broke" it, beating top candidates in under 2 hours. But while the AI can spit out the answer, I wanted to understand the mechanics under the hood. And AI-generated solutions carry 0 educational value.
So in the post I dug into every single detail of the accelerator architecture to see exactly where the bottlenecks were.
I cover the 3 main optimizations that took my solution from a released baseline to a 65x speedup.
It’s a deep dive, but I wrote it to be accessible. Even if you don't do low-level optimization, I’ve included visualizations to explain SIMD, VLIW, and everything — you'll enjoy it!
===
The "retirement" of a take-home is a warning sign for hiring, though. This test was retired because Opus crushed it. As we look toward Opus 5 likely solving even harder problems in 4 hours... what does a "good" take-home exam look like in 2026? How would you test the candidates?
What specific signals should we be testing for, and how do you design a task to capture that?