Solo Rust entry with AI agents wins 500x to 2,050x speedups in Speed Demon 2026

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A solo entrant in the Speed Demon 2026 contest used mainly AI coding agents, chiefly Claude Code with some Codex work, to speed up four slow Python programs. The challenge required outputs to remain byte-identical, and the organisers ran submissions on their own hardware, hashing every output. The author's final builds reached speedups of roughly 500x to 2,050x across the four tracks, with the human role focused on setting rules, choosing which changes to keep, and monitoring results. On the live final run, the entry placed third on the machine score with 84.68 points, 0.11 behind second place. The judges' 35% code-quality share was still pending at the time of writing.

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