A funded vendor's agent scores 92.9% on a public enterprise agent benchmark. A bare harness on the same model weights scores 58.6%. I closed that gap for about $300, using nothing but written-down failure knowledge, and MIT licensed the result.
"The customer rents the outcome. The vendor keeps the compounding asset."
On what enterprises are actually buying when they buy an AI agent. read the full story →
The Result
Same weights in all three rows. GLM-5.2 throughout, on DevRev's Enterprise-Bench l1-l2, 140 trials each. Every difference below is the layer wrapped around the model, not the model.
34.3 points separate the bare harness from the vendor's own agent. That gap is what enterprises are buying. A written catalogue of failure modes covers it, and 1.4 points more, on identical weights.
To be completely explicit: that third row is submitted as a pull request and is not yet on the leaderboard. It may be rejected. The run is 140 trials on the public benchmark with a job ID anyone can open, and the number will be whatever it is. The separately accepted entry, Trinity-EFC on DeepSeek V4 Pro, is live at 78.6% against a 51.4% baseline, rank 4 of 14, with pass@10 of 1.000.
Trinity
Agents fail silently inside real systems. A status filter that also matches reopened tickets, an org record split by an acquisition, an endpoint that paginates at 50. Every one returns HTTP 200. The knowledge that prevents this exists in exactly one place: the head of somebody who already got burned by it. Trinity is an attempt to get it out of there and into the open.
Failure modes written as plain text skills, loaded statically into the agent's context. Exhaustive. Everything present at all times. No database.
51.4% → 78.6% on DeepSeek V4 Pro. pass@10 of 1.000.
The same knowledge decomposed into a graph and retrieved selectively, so only the fraction relevant to the current state is pulled. Built on Cognee, backed by Neo4j, with Postgres and pgvector alongside.
40.7% → 57.1% on a different harness. The knowledge transfers.
What I Am Not Claiming
A post arguing that vendors hide unflattering results should visibly not hide its own. All of the above is in the writeup, and the trial data is public.
Six years as a forward deployed engineer, one public benchmark, $300, and what it means for build vs buy.
Everything is MIT licensed. The methodology and trial data are published in full.
Verify It Yourself
Who Ran This
Forward Deployed Engineer
Three years at Qure.ai deploying regulated medical imaging models into hospitals and OEM devices. Three years self employed, building research systems for small US hedge funds. Trinity is an attempt to write down what six years of that work actually taught me, and to test whether writing it down is enough.