Definition
Plain language
The program that actually runs your code and reports what it produced.
As stated in the literature
Runtime that executes source or bytecode directly; used here as the trusted oracle for computing expected outputs instead of having the model predict them.
Also called: interpreters
Why it matters: Letting the machine compute expected values instead of having the model guess them removes a whole class of confidently wrong test expectations.
For example, rather than asking the model what "add(2, 3)" should return, you hand the line to the interpreter, it runs the real code, and it reports 5.
Heard on the show
“One is an interpreter: it reads the first line, does it, reads the next line, does it, no planning, no optimization, just sequential execution one statement at a time.”Episode 063 — Why Web Agents Are Slow: A Compiler-Style Fix for Computer-Use Latency