FrugalEvo Cuts AI Code Evolution to $0.55

🔥 What happened Researchers from NUS and Stanford dropped FrugalEvo — a framework where a pricey LLM plans the strategy and a cheap LLM writes and refines the code. On circle packing it hits new state-of-the-art for $1.68 (GPT-5.6) and just $0.55 (GLM-5.3). 💡 Why it matters Prior evolution methods like AlphaEvolve optimize per iteration, not per dollar. FrugalEvo beats multi-agent baselines such as CORAL and SwarmResearch — which burn roughly $50 per run — and wins on 9 of 10 tasks under a new Budget-Aware AUC metric. ⚡ Our take If you're still throwing expensive agent swarms at optimization problems in 2026, you're lighting money on fire. The winning pattern is two-tier: smart model thinks, cheap model grinds.