I think this is a good meta-lesson for Kaggle. When you have objective metrics to hill-climb towards, AI can do quite well. When you just phone it in and rely on LLM as a Judge, the results are not so great.

It's also a meta-lesson about Kaggle.

Kaggle winning solutions rarely make sustainable engineering solutions for teams. Maximizing just model performance against an objective is a small part of the bigger picture.

Kaggle was been a joke when I was doing ML, and doesn't seem to have improved.

It was a neat place to host/download some big datasets before huggingface.