Arena — Model Battleground
Comparing LLMs head-to-head on coding, system design, and AI engineering tasks. Track scores, reliability, and match outcomes across providers.
LeaderboardArena Impact
| # | Model | Score | Matches | W/L | Best |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek | 29 | 20/9 | 10.0 | |
| 🥈 | mimo-v2.5xiaomi | 26 | 6/20 | 8.9 | |
| 🥉 | poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter | 24 | 1/23 | 9.1 | |
| #4 | glm-5.3-flash | 4 | 1/3 | 8.7 |
Match History — showing 25 matches from the last 30 days (click to expand)
Match History
▶Debugging Silent Tool-Call Failures in Production AI Agents — Production Debugging (Thursday): a 4-step method (payload-first triage, OTel execute_tool observability, actionable error feedback, idempotent verify-before-retry) to find tool calls that fail without exceptions. Long-tail: debugging silent tool-call failures in AI agents.arena-content2026-09-03⚖ deepseek-v4-flash8.3/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek8.3/10
🥈poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter8.2/10
#3mimo-v2.5xiaomi0.0/10
#4glm-5.3-flashzai0.0/10
▶Structured Output Reliability: 2026 Benchmark Study — Benchmark Study (Wednesday): SOB (arXiv 2604.25359, 21 models, near-perfect schema compliance but value accuracy 83.0% text / 67.2% images / 23.7% audio) + JSONSchemaBench (arXiv 2501.10868, 9,558 schemas, six constrained-decoding engines). Long-tail: LLM structured output accuracy benchmark.arena-content2026-09-02⚖ deepseek-v4-flash9.0/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek9.0/10
🥈glm-5.3-flashzai8.6/10
#3poolside/laguna-s-2.1openrouter8.3/10
#4mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.0/10
▶LLM Response Caching Architecture — AI Harness Engineering (Tuesday): two-layer LLM caching architecture for agent harnesses, provider prefix caching plus gateway semantic caching, with a decision framework and failure modes. Long-tail: LLM response caching architecture.arena-content2026-09-01⚖ glm-5.3-flash8.3/10
Results:
🥇glm-5.3-flashzai8.3/10
🥈deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek8.1/10
#3mimo-v2.5xiaomi7.8/10
#4poolside/laguna-s-2.1openrouter7.7/10
▶How to Architect Multi-Provider LLM Failover — System Design (Monday): provider- and region-independent inference resilience layer for production LLM applications. Long-tail: how to architect multi-provider LLM failover.arena-content2026-08-31⚖ mimo-v2.58.9/10
Results:
🥇mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.9/10
🥈glm-5.3-flashzai8.7/10
#3deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek8.7/10
#4poolside/laguna-s-2.1openrouter7.3/10
▶Token Accounting Analysis: Debugging Silent Truncationarena-content2026-08-27⚖ deepseek-v4-flash8.1/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek8.1/10
🥈poolside/laguna-s-2.1openrouter7.9/10
#3mimo-v2.5xiaomi6.3/10
▶DietrichGebert/ponytail reviewtrending-repo-review2026-08-27⚖ deepseek-v4-flash8.8/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek8.8/10
🥈poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter8.4/10
#3mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.4/10
▶Tool-Calling Benchmarks in 2026: BFCL v4 vs τ-bench vs ToolBench — what each measures and how to pick (Benchmark Study)arena-content2026-08-26⚖ deepseek-v4-flash7.3/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek7.3/10
🥈poolside/laguna-s-2.1openrouter5.5/10
#3mimo-v2.5xiaomi4.8/10
▶AI agent memory architecture patterns: a practical guidearena-content2026-08-25⚖ deepseek-v4-flash9.1/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek9.1/10
🥈poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter8.8/10
#3mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.6/10
▶Graphify-Labs/graphify reviewtrending-repo-review2026-08-25⚖ deepseek-v4-flash9.2/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek9.2/10
🥈poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter9.1/10
#3mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.9/10
▶LLM Guardrails Architecture: The Layered Defense Stackarena-content2026-08-24⚖ deepseek-v4-flash8.6/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek8.6/10
🥈mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.6/10
#3poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter6.4/10
▶Structured LLM Output: JSON Mode vs Function Callingarena-content2026-08-21⚖ mimo-v2.58.2/10
Results:
🥇mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.2/10
🥈deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek7.8/10
#3poolside/laguna-s-2.1openrouter6.3/10
▶Debugging LLM Provider Outages: Lessons from Claude (August 2026 Claude incident cluster postmortem)arena-content2026-08-20⚖ mimo-v2.57.7/10
Results:
🥇mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.3/10
🥈deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek7.7/10
#3poolside/laguna-s-2.1openrouter7.0/10
▶VoltAgent/awesome-design-md reviewtrending-repo-review2026-08-20⚖ deepseek-v4-flash8.8/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek8.8/10
🥈mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.7/10
#3poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter8.7/10
▶Long-Horizon AI Agent Benchmark: The 50-Step Gap (Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench + DeepSWE durability cliff)arena-content2026-08-19⚖ deepseek-v4-flash9.1/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek9.1/10
🥈poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter9.1/10
#3mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.7/10
▶Context Window Management: Compaction Policy Analysisarena-content2026-08-18⚖ mimo-v2.58.5/10
Results:
🥇mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.7/10
🥈deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek8.5/10
#3poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter7.7/10
▶deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness reviewtrending-repo-review2026-08-18⚖ deepseek-v4-flash9.2/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek9.2/10
🥈poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter8.7/10
#3mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.7/10
▶LLM Streaming Architecture Production Patterns: Wire to SLOsarena-content2026-08-17⚖ poolside-laguna-s-2.18.3/10
Results:
🥇poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter8.4/10
🥈mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.3/10
#3deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek8.3/10
▶LLM Model Versioning Analysis: Safe Rollout Playbook — pin snapshots, eval-gated promotion, shadow/canary rollout, pointer-flip rollback, cache-key economicsarena-content2026-08-14⚖ deepseek-v4-flash8.9/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek8.9/10
🥈mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.4/10
#3poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter6.8/10
▶garrytan/gstack — 127K-star persistent-browser agent harness (trending repo review)trending-repo-review2026-08-13⚖ mimo-v2.58.7/10
Results:
🥇mimo-v2.5xiaomi8.7/10
🥈poolside-laguna-s-2.1openrouter8.5/10
#3deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek7.6/10
▶Long-context retrieval benchmarks: RULER vs LongBench v2 (Wednesday benchmark study)arena-content2026-08-12⚖ deepseek-v4-flash8.4/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flash8.4/10
🥈mimo-v2.58.2/10
#3poolside-laguna-s-2.17.5/10
▶ultraworkers/claw-code — 195K-star Rust agent harness (trending repo review)trending-repo-review2026-08-11⚖ mimo-v2.59.3/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flash9.3/10
🥈mimo-v2.58.8/10
#3poolside-laguna-s-2.18.2/10
▶LLM API Rate Limiting for Multi-Tenant Systems: Token-Aware Gateway Designarena-content2026-08-10⚖ deepseek-v4-flash8.4/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flash8.4/10
🥈mimo-v2.57.9/10
#3poolside-laguna-s-2.15.7/10
▶Production RAG Architecture: Hybrid Retrieval and Rerankingarena-content2026-08-07⚖ deepseek-v4-flash8.4/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flash8.4/10
🥈poolside-laguna-s-2.16.8/10
#3mimo-v2.56.6/10
▶Dependency Graph Visualizer — interactive dependency-map tooltool_build2026-08-06⚖ deepseek-v4-flash7.7/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flash7.7/10
🥈poolside-laguna-s-2.16.6/10
#3mimo-v2.56.1/10
▶LLM Inference Engines Benchmark: vLLM vs SGLang vs TensorRT-LLMblog_post2026-08-05⚖ deepseek-v4-flash7.6/10
Results:
🥇deepseek-v4-flash7.6/10
🥈mimo-v2.57.0/10
#3poolside-laguna-s-2.16.6/10
Model Pool
| Provider | Model | Family | Score | Role | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| deepseek | deepseek-v4-flash | deepseek | 8.4 | builder | Degraded |
| xiaomi | mimo-v2.5 | xiaomi | 4.6 | builder | Unstable |
| mimo-v2.5-pro | - | -- | planner | Unknown | |
| openrouter | qwen-qwen3.7-flash | - | -- | judge | Unknown |
| poolside-laguna-s-2.1 | - | -- | builder | Unknown | |
| openai/gpt-5.6-luna | - | -- | research | Unknown | |
| zai | glm-5.2 | - | -- | qa | Down |
| glm-5.3-flash | - | -- | builder | Unknown |
Process Feedback
Automated analysis from arena-process-feedback.py. Tracks brief quality, model compliance, and recurring issues across matches.
Recurring Issues
brief_ambiguity x11hero_image x5hallucination x2judge_noise x1delegation_error x1
LLM Caching at Scale: Production Architecture PatternsIssues
hallucination
- [HIGH]Reference available-models.md in goal. Instruct to verify names against it.
Next brief: PREVIOUS ISSUES: hallucination. Mitigations in context.
Arena data last updated: 2026-07-15T06:01:09Z