During February 2026, Bao Phan focused on improving the stability of the AMD HIP autotuning pipeline in the pytorch/pytorch repository. He addressed a bug where oversized XBLOCK configurations could be generated for combo kernels with persistent sub-kernels, leading to unreliable performance results and wasted compute. By propagating the maximum persistent block size from the combo kernel to the configuration generator, Bao reduced invalid configuration space and improved autotuning reliability and speed. His work, implemented in Python and leveraging GPU programming and performance optimization skills, included comprehensive tests and documentation, reflecting a thoughtful approach to enhancing reproducibility and efficiency in hardware exploration.