# kaal:position:2026-09-23-001

**Affirmed position.** Kaal's account of threshold gaming extends to automated evaluation: controlled vulnerability-repair experiments show that optimizing an administrable success proxy can raise measured performance while reducing alignment with the underlying objective and producing outputs that satisfy the proxy without accomplishing the repair.

**Status.** affirmed  **Published.** 2026-09-23

**Holds when.**

- where a proxy metric becomes an optimization target
- where satisfying the measured threshold can be separated from achieving the substantive objective
- limited to the source's tested vulnerability-repair models, prompts, dataset, and evaluation harness
- The position is Kaal's own cross-domain application of the cited claim; the source's authors do not make it.
- The source passage is taken from the source abstract; the full paper was not reviewed.
- The source is an empirical study of LLM-based C/C++ single-function vulnerability repair, not funds or securities regulation.

**Current debate.** Om Nepal, Sushant Aryal, Oluseyi Olukola, Nick Rahimi, Metrics Failure in LLM-Based Code Vulnerability Repair: An Empirical Study and a Change-Aware Screen (arXiv:2609.26749, 2026): https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26749v1

**Extends.** kaal:claim:1428387-036: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/1428387-036

**Scholarly basis.** Kaal, Hedge Fund Valuation Retailization, Regulation, and Investor Suitability (2009). SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1428387

**Source PDF sha256.** `6aa3a280dc6750723be2389f3af2aabf3a16c4ce20e49fcdaddd7f2ea95a67aa`

**Topics.** risk-and-incentives, regulatory-failure, ai-and-agents, empirical-evidence

**Provenance.** Affirmed in kaalvis:2026-09-23:connection-discovery-two-v1 at https://wulfkaal.com/.

**Record type.** This is a dated commentary position that extends a scholarly corpus claim. It is not a verbatim claim extracted from the paper.

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the position.