Does automated evolution match human-built agent performance?

The discussion's comparison: "On four held-out benchmarks spanning in- and out-of-distribution tasks, AIDE85 equals or surpasses AIDEhuman (section 3.3), a strong baseline developed through human-driven R&D (appendix B)." The evolved agent is labeled "AIDE85" in the excerpt, which does not define the label; I read it as the agent after the seven accepted rewrites, and that identification is mine.

The baseline is the point of the sentence. Seven rewrites accepted by an automated loop in 8 days are set against an agent that people improved by hand, and the paper's claim is that the loop's product is at least as good on tasks the loop did not select on. Read with Do AIDE2's improvements transfer to unseen tasks?, it says the automated route matched the human route on the held-out set.

What "equals or surpasses" does and does not say. It leaves room for ties on some benchmarks and wins on others, and the excerpt does not say which are which or by how much. It is a comparison to AIDEhuman, not to a test-time-search baseline at matched budget, so it does not stand in for the control in How should we measure gains from automatic harness evolution?. And it is a comparison with a human-driven R&D baseline, not with human–AI collaboration, so it does not test Can human-AI research teams improve faster than autonomous AI systems?: neither speed nor safety is compared in the excerpt, and the effort behind AIDEhuman (appendix B) is not given.