I Pruned Two Layers From a 30B Code Model and It Got 123% Better at Coding Benchmarks. Then I Tested It On Real Software Engineering Tasks.

..it got worse. But the full story is a bit more interesting than that. The Setup I have two projects that collided. Thunderdome is an agentic SWE benchmark I built that tests models on real multi-file tasks. Unlike SWE-bench, which is mostly &ldquo;here&rsquo;s a bug, fix it,&rdquo; Thunderdome tasks are greenfield &ndash; build an ecommerce backend, implement full-text search, create a plugin…