Yes at temperature 1 it would need to be averaged. The mechanical scoring is hidden specs through and if they don’t pass that it’s not often a result of temp, but instruction following or verification (different flavor of instruction following given what they are told to do). What’s surprising is just how well they do on this dimension even with the variance. On my tasks anyway, maybe Rails work isn’t that complicated. It’s probably not that I am an amazing ticket writer.

I have run multiple with the same model through issues to see the output. What differs run to run on the same model is style, likelihood to find subtle bugs and chance to correctly guess author intent. I don’t score them on those things though, only note them.

To me, multiple vertical samples is more useful to the coder who isn’t benchmarking these as their job. The average is abstract to you if you’re not going to pointing them at a ticket more than once, but seeing their output over 10 different tickets will give you a window into model tendencies, strengths and weaknesses and help you understand how to write for them. Overall the exercise has made me a better issue writer.