Type: url
Original: https://openhands.dev/blog/20260305-learning-to-verify-ai-generated-code
Status: partial
Summary
An OpenHands blog post (March 5, 2026) argues that verification, not code generation, is now the bottleneck for coding agents, and introduces the first layer of what OpenHands calls a verification stack: a small, fast critic model that scores an agent’s whole trajectory. The critic is trained on real-world production traces, using dense rubric annotations grounded in sparse outcome proxies such as PR merge and code survival, and the post reports that benchmark-only critics perform near random on production outcomes while the production-trained critic improves best-of-N selection and early stopping on SWE-bench Verified. The critic is available in the OpenHands SDK and CLI.