Parker Whitfill

Technical Staff

Parker works on understanding AI capabilities. He is currently on leave from an Economics PhD at MIT.

By Parker Whitfill

Task Substitution and Uplift

8 May 2026

We distinguish three measures of AI uplift -- on old tasks, on new tasks, and in value -- and show that task substitution can cause these to diverge substantially.

Many SWE-bench-Passing PRs Would Not Be Merged into Main

10 March 2026

We find that roughly half of test-passing SWE-bench Verified PRs written by recent AI agents would not be merged into main by repo maintainers. A naive interpretation of benchmark scores may lead one to overestimate how useful agents are without more elicitation or human feedback.