It's deeply surprising to me that LLMs have had more success proving higher math theorems than making successful consumer software

Software developers have spent decades at this point discounting and ignoring almost all objective metrics for software quality and the industry as a whole has developed a general disregard for any metric that isn't time-to-ship (and even there they will ignore faster alternatives in favor of hyped choices).

(Edit: Yes, I'm aware a lot of people care about FP, "Clean Code", etc., but these are all red herrings that don't actually have anything to do with quality. At best they are guidelines for less experienced programmers and at worst a massive waste of time if you use more than one or two suggestions from their collection of ideas.)

Most of the industry couldn't use objective metrics for code quality and the quality of the artifacts they produce without also abandoning their entire software stack because of the results. They're using the only metric they've ever cared about; time-to-ship. The results are just a sped up version of what we've had now for more than two decades: Software is getting slower, buggier and less usable.

If you don't have a good regulating function for what represents real quality you can't really expect systems that just pump out code to actually iterate very well on anything. There are very few forcing functions to use to produce high quality results though iteration.

They haven't, not at all as far as I can tell. This math problem appears to be a nice chore to be solved, the equivalent to "Claude, optimize this code" or "Write a parser", which is being done 100000x a day.