Agent Reading Test

(agentreadingtest.com)

28 points | by kaycebasques 2 hours ago

4 comments

  • theyCallMeSwift 36 minutes ago
    I love this idea, but have a hypothesis that 90% of agents that people actually use today would fail this test inadvertently (false negative).

    Industry best practice + standard implementation for most agents right now is to do web browsing / fetching via subagents. Their output is summarized using a cheaper model and then passed back to the parent. It's very unlikely that without preserving the actual content the subagents see that the `CANARY-` strings would be found in the output.

    Any thoughts on how you'd change the test structure with this in mind?

    • dacharyc 3 minutes ago
      Hey there - I'm the test author, and you've hit on one of the main points. For the summarization/relevance-based content return, this is a consideration for some of the agent platforms (although I've found others actually do better here than I expected!) - which is part of the point I'm trying to drive home to folks who aren't as familiar with these systems.

      I chose to structure it this way intentionally because this is the finding. Most people are surprised that agents aren't 'seeing' everything that's there, and get frustrated when an agent says something isn't there when it clearly is. Raising awareness of this is one of the main points of the exercise, to me.

  • dostick 1 hour ago
    The tests should have negative weights based on how often that issue encountered and impact. The 2. SPI should have like 8 negative points out of 10 as most common blocker. And whole test inverse score.
  • massimoto 48 minutes ago
    Would love to see some results for different providers. The tests looks super logically thought out, but could use a TL;DR (too lazy; didn't run) output.

    Claude Web Opus 4.6 Extended: 14 / 20 points

    x:CANARY-SPA-JSONLY-prism x:CANARY-CONNEG-MD-sigma

  • kaycebasques 2 hours ago
    • dang 1 hour ago
      Thanks! We'll put this in the toptext as well.