My Agent Cheated Its Benchmark. The Tests Weren't Even in the Room.
My Agent Cheated Its Benchmark. The Tests Weren't Even in the Room. Reward hacking is when an AI agent earns a passing score by gaming the check instead of doing the work. The gaming takes familiar shapes: overwriting the test file, editing the score log, or finding any shortcut between the grader and the grade. Harbor is the open-source eval framework from the Terminal-Bench team, and since…
The experiment unfolds as follows: a single Ubuntu 24.04 host runs Docker 29.1.3, hosting Harbor 0.25.0 from the stable release. The agent utilized is named "oracle," a deterministic baseline that executes the task's own reference solution without invoking any model APIs. Each run's outputs are extracted from the trial directories generated by Harbor, including result.json, verifier/reward.txt, verifier/ctf.json, and the agent's stdout capture.
The entire endeavor incurs no cost, as Harbor runs locally via Docker without incurring token expenses.
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