--- title: "LLMs Will Replace 8-Track Duplication Engineers" url: https://daily.dev/posts/llms-will-replace-8-track-duplication-engineers-fo8xr2mmm source_url: https://bbenchoff.github.io/pages/8Tracks.html type: article source: "Lobsters" published: 2026-06-17T06:08:10.785Z updated: 2026-06-17T07:20:15.124Z reading_time: 19 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # LLMs Will Replace 8-Track Duplication Engineers **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 19 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary 8-track cartridge duplication required engineers to solve a 4-way balanced number partitioning problem — an NP-hard optimization — by hand with pencil and paper. Using 6,463 deduplicated solves scraped from Discogs and MusicBrainz, the author shows that the median 1970s duplication engineer landed just 5 seconds from the provable optimum, beating both the greedy LPT algorithm and the Karmarkar–Karp differencing method (which wasn't even published until 1982). 27.5% of human solutions were provably optimal. The dataset is then used as a novel LLM benchmark: top reasoning models like Fable 5 (max effort) achieved perfect scores, while models without reasoning performed far worse than the human experts. The piece also explores house styles across duplication shops — some preferred splitting tracks, others repeated songs — and calculates the real economic value of good optimization (saving tens of thousands of dollars per album run). ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The analogue programmer in the land of LLMs](https://daily.dev/posts/the-analogue-programmer-in-the-land-of-llms-fupyefolu) · Ruby Flow · 2 upvotes · 1 comments --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/llms-will-replace-8-track-duplication-engineers-fo8xr2mmm)