FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How to interpret the benchmark.
Direct answers about the workload, ranking, evaluation, cost, and what this public leaderboard does—and does not—represent.
What is Faros Route Index?
Faros Route Index is a public catalog that compares complete AI coding routes using the same set of real Faros engineering tasks. It publishes each official benchmark run with quality, cost, cache use, task-level evidence, and runtime when the source recorded it.
Is this a universal AI model ranking?
No. It is evidence for the Faros Engineering Benchmark. A different organization, repository mix, or task distribution may produce a different ranking.
What is an AI coding route?
A route is the complete configuration used to do the work: coding harness, model, provider, effort level, and relevant runtime settings. Faros Route Index compares routes because changing the harness or effort can change the outcome even when the model is the same.
What work is included?
Each benchmark version contains a stable cohort of anonymized tasks sampled from real Faros engineering work across product domains, task intents, and complexity levels. Every route in a run receives that same cohort.
How is quality judged?
Each generated change is graded against a task-specific rubric by a blinded judge. The quality score is the mean percentage of rubric credit earned; it is not blended with cost or runtime.
How are cost, runtime, and cache hit measured?
Cost uses observed token usage with the provider pricing configured for the run. Runtime is the observed end-to-end duration when captured; a dash means the source did not record it. Cache hit is the share of eligible input served from cache; it is not itself a discount and does not determine total cost.
How often is the leaderboard updated?
New models, harnesses, and providers can be tested against the stable cohort as they become relevant. Every official benchmark run is dated, preserved, and selectable so results do not silently change.
Can I benchmark my own repositories here?
No. This public page does not accept customer repositories. It publishes the Faros benchmark. Customer-specific optimization—connecting engineering data, identifying opportunities, and validating policies—is a separate Faros product workflow.