How much time did you give them? At maximum effort I can't believe they just threw up their hands and said it was too hard. I'm guessing you really mean they failed a zero-shot?
30 minutes. Most don't run out of time though, they produce incorrect results that they believe are correct.
So they believed they had succeeded at the goal, but failed? What goal did you set? What happened instead? Did they have a mechanism to check their work?
Most tasks receive the interpreter binary which the coding agent can run to test their code (though the binary itself is adversarial too, there is a fun easter egg in there if anyone wants to give it a try). Some tasks just get the spec and a piece of code to understand. Some models interpret the code/spec incorrectly so fail that one.