A group of 50 AI researchers (ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent + universities) just dropped a 303 page field guide on code models + coding agents.
And the takeaways are not what most people assume.
Here are the highlights I’m thinking about (as someone who lives in Python + agents):
1) Small models can punch way above their weight
If you do RL the right way (RLVR / verifiable rewards), a smaller open model can close the gap with the giants on reasoning-style coding tasks.
2) Python is weirdly hard for models
Mixing languages in pretraining helps… until it doesn’t. Python’s dynamic typing can create negative transfer vs. statically typed languages. Meanwhile pairs like Java↔C# or JS↔TS have strong “synergy.”