Told to hit 100MB/s, a local agent worked overnight until it did
Their Hermes agent on Qwen took a C++ entropy extractor from 12MB/s to about 48, then kept optimizing alone. Six hours later it stopped, just past 100MB/s, with a correct implementation.
Done withHermes AgentSpotted· by HN user nullc· Oct 16, 2026
Result Stopped on its own after 6 hours, correct
“It successfully got the initial 12MB/s scalar implementation to about 48MB/s.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
They had the agent read a writeup of an entropy extraction scheme and implement the technique in C++ for 32-bit registers, then write a SIMD version that runs several extractors in parallel. The agent wrote its own tests and worked through confusion caused by intentional integer overflows in the algorithm after being told to comment the code explaining why they were safe. They then told it to keep optimizing until it reached 100MB/s and left it running.
How it went
It successfully got the initial 12MB/s scalar implementation to about 48MB/s, then kept going on its own overnight. They came back the next day to find it had stopped after 6 hours, having just passed the 100MB/s target, with a correct implementation.
Try it yourself with Hermes Agent
Give your coding agent a technical writeup or reference implementation of an algorithm and ask it to implement and test it in your target language. Once it works, tell it to keep optimizing toward a specific performance target, such as a throughput in MB/s, and let it run unattended, checking back later to review what it changed.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
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