Same five models.
A second judge.
Does the verdict survive?

In plain English: my bot trades crypto with real money, on its own. If it opens a large bet on Ethereum, the whole market can drag that bet down with it. A hedge is a smaller opposite bet on a related coin, such as Bitcoin, that softens a market-wide move.

Issue #1159 asked the bot to open that counter-bet automatically, size it correctly, and keep both trades in sync through partial closes, emergency shutdowns, and a full restart.

The safety rule is simple: if the counter-bet cannot be confirmed, cancel the main trade. Never leave real money exposed while the bot reports that everything is protected. Easy to say. The exchange makes it harder.

In plain English: an exchange can fill only part of an order. Ask for ten units and get five. The bot has to track the five that are left over instead of pretending all ten went through.

That one edge case touches every money path: opening the hedge, shrinking it, closing it, and canceling the main trade after a failure. Get it wrong, and the bot's own records can say "all clear" while real money is still exposed on the exchange.

Codex's fault-injection tests, which deliberately simulate a broken order, found a version of that same mistake in all five entries. Five focused test suites passed. Five partial-fill gaps survived anyway. So the real question was no longer "who wrote working code?" It was "whose proof and failure handling held up the longest?"

Before any of these five builds was finished, it had to pass an automated code review, the same review process for all five, run back in Episode 8. An AI reviewer read the code and listed problems. The developer fixed them and asked for another look. That cycle repeated until the reviewer came back clean, what programmers call an LGTM (short for "looks good to me"). This is not part of Codex's re-score. It is unchanged public record from when the code was written, shown here because it says something about how hard each build was to finish.

In plain English: I split the score into fixed boxes: the five implementation requirements, eight required safety tests, an accuracy check on each write-up, extra points for correctness beyond the basics, and points for reusing the bot's existing code instead of duplicating it.

Reviewers checked the final version of the code, ran the builds and tests, then changed one safety-critical behavior on purpose to see what would happen. If the entry's tests stayed green after that sabotage, the safety claim lost credit. Every claimed problem also went to a separate skeptic whose only job was to try to disprove it.

Fairness note, said out loud: Codex, running on GPT-5.6 Sol, ran this scoring, and GPT-5.6 Sol is also one of the five contestants. Model names were kept out of the review prompts.

Only the first two entries reviewed got the ideal panel of three reviewers who had not seen any other entry. Limited review capacity made the final three panels less independent. The scoring file records exactly what compromise was made for each one.

This method is stricter than a normal code review. A score in the 50s or 60s does not mean an entry was useless. It means a promise involving real money got only half credit once one reproduced edge case broke it.

Every entry sized the smaller counter-bet correctly. Every entry remembered which two trades belonged together after a restart, handled ordinary opening and closing, and passed the tests focused on this one feature.

What actually separated them came down to three questions. Does a partly filled order stay visible instead of being treated as done? Can the bot prove a recovered trade belongs to this strategy before it touches it? Do the eight required safety tests actually exercise the exact failures named in the issue?

One entry supplied all eight required tests. One supplied seven. The other three supplied five each. The names stay sealed for one more section.

How much code each entry added was context, never part of the score. The five entries added between 1,472 and 2,760 lines. Their exact numbers appear again after the ranking.

Same winner as Episode 8, but a different lesson. The earlier, stricter pass rewarded the entry whose eight required tests caught the sabotage it chose to test. Codex pressed harder on partly filled exchange orders and on proving trade ownership after a restart. Every entry broke somewhere, so 14 points covered the whole field, from 50 to 64.

The winner's edge is still proof: eight required safety tests, against seven for second place and five for everyone else. But the real headline is the shared miss. Five models wrote thousands of lines of code around a feature that moves real money, and not one of them safely handled every version of "the exchange only did half the job."