605 deaths on easy

Reality Check · Ins7ghts Daily, Wednesday 21 October 2026

Years ago I had a residency where one channel of the venue's sound system was broken. The room sounded so bad that people complained. Early in the evening I went to the boss and asked him to bring in the sound engineer; he told me to fix it myself. There was nothing I could fix, it was a fault in the house system. I played the night to the end anyway, the bad night was blamed on my performance, and I lost the residency. The person standing at the front takes the blame for the system behind them, and nobody writes down which one actually failed.

That is the gap in the week's most repeated claim. Google DeepMind says four agents running Gemini 4 Argon beat Minecraft in 27 hours, writing 2,783 programs of their own on the way. It was retold everywhere as evidence that agents can now be handed long work and left alone. The receipt is in the same announcement: the team died 605 times on easy difficulty and ran up an estimated $520 in tokens to kill one dragon.

Put a second measurement beside it. Endor Labs ran the same model on Cursor and reported a solid security score and two unique solves, but slower and more expensive than the alternatives. Same capability, measured by somebody who was not selling it, and the cost shows up again.