AgentKernelArena: Benchmarking AI Coding Agents for GPU Kernel Optimization on AMD Instinct GPUs

AI coding agents such as Cursor Agent, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex are improving fast, and people increasingly trust them with specialized, high-stakes work, including GPU kernel optimization. But most of the public evidence is still a cherry-picked demo on a single kernel, not a controlled, head-to-head comparison on the same tasks, the same hardware, and the same scoring rules. On AMD Instinct™ GPUs, where every percentage point of kernel performance translates directly into training and inference cost, that gap matters.