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Every post has the details, process, and exact settings to duplicate it yourself. The site is live and maintained — and most of the work here, including this site itself, is done with LLMs.

A bear in a firefighter's helmet, laser-engraved into a curved acacia board

MakoBench

Language models scored on code and chat with one open test suite, run on our own hardware. Suite 4.0.

  1. DeepSeek V4 Flash 19.2
  2. Grok 4.7 19.0
  3. Kimi K3.1 Pro 18.9

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Latest projects

Builds, guides, and experiments from the shop.

AI & Local LLM

MakoBench 4.1: What Changed

Suite 4.1 is a correction release with no new cases. Two independent model reviewers read every public answer key, about 190 problems were confirmed, and the board is being re-run. Chat scores should rise slightly; Code should barely move.

November 8, 2026 · Updated November 8, 2026
AI & Local LLM

How MakoBench Works: Open LLM Benchmark Explained

How MakoBench turns a model's answers into a score, step by step, with a diagram for each: how cases are graded, how the judge works, Code plus Chat, the margin, and how bonus sets unlock. Worked examples use real models from the board.

November 5, 2026 · Updated November 8, 2026
AI & Local LLM

MakoBench Adds a Run Cost Column

Hosted models on the MakoBench board now show what one run of the standard Code and Chat tests cost. Replies a provider's content filter blocks are marked on the row and score zero.

November 7, 2026 · Updated November 7, 2026
AI & Local LLM

How CrucibleForge Works: An Open LLM Benchmark, Explained

CrucibleForge is the free, open-source benchmark behind the MakoBench board. Five blocks, one diagram: your model, a setup check, the tests, the graders and the scores. Plus a ten-minute guide to running it on a local server or a hosted API.

November 7, 2026
AI & Local LLM

What MakoBench Tests, and What It Doesn't

MakoBench tests text models on two jobs, working code and role-play or companion chat. Here is which models belong on the board, which never will, and what a row needs before it gets a rank.

November 6, 2026 · Updated November 6, 2026
AI & Local LLM

MakoBench Suite History: Earlier Versions

The MakoBench tests change from time to time, and a score only means something inside the suite that produced it. Here is where the earlier boards live and why we kept them.

November 5, 2026
AI & Local LLM

MakoBench Suite 4.0: Nominal 20, Class and Lean

Suite 4.0 scores Code and Chat at 10 each instead of a percentage, drops the slowest and noisiest tests, and adds Class and Lean. Here is what the public release changed and what is in our own copy of the tool but not yet in a release.

November 5, 2026 · Updated November 5, 2026
AI & Local LLM

Run CrucibleForge on Your Own Models: Install Guide

Install CrucibleForge, the open-source engine behind MakoBench, point it at any OpenAI-compatible model and get Code and Chat scores, 10 each for a perfect standard run. Real commands, real output, and a 1.6-minute smoke test that cost 2 cents.

November 5, 2026 · Updated November 5, 2026
AI & Local LLM

MIT-0 license: why every Laser Lloyd project uses it

Every open-source project we publish now carries MIT-0, the MIT licence with the attribution requirement removed: take the code, change it, put it in a product you sell, and you do not have to keep our notice or credit us.

November 2, 2026