ForgeCode claims it beats Claude Code and Codex, but the fine print tells another story

A self-run leaderboard says ForgeCode tops Claude Code and Codex. The independent benchmark that actually matters tells a much narrower story, and the real finding has nothing to do with which model is smartest. ForgeCode, a terminal-based coding harness built by Tailcall Inc., is leading TermBench 2.0 with a score of 81.8%, and the tool's own marketing has leaned hard on that number to position itself above Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. There's a catch worth stating plainly: TermBench 2.0 lives at tbench.ai, and ForgeCode submitted its own result to it. It's not an independent benchmark. It's a self-reported score on a leaderboard the company itself can shape. On SWE-bench Verified, the benchmark Princeton and the University of Chicago actually run and validate by hand, the gap nearly disappears.

First reported by Startup Fortune. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.