November 7, 2026 · 5 min read
Weight-space programming: what the Astra paper actually edited, explained
A frontier model, GPT-6 Astra, was shown reading and rewriting a smaller model's raw weights as text — editing 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B lifted its MATH-500 score from 7.9% to 48.1%. Then the rebuttals and a laptop replication arrived within two days. What the paper actually did, and why reading the primary source first still matters.



