literally the first thing I told you

No offense but yes, I read your comments, and exactly from your comments i figured out that most probably you did what you think was cloning, but really was not ;)

so how can other people swap stuff arround with cloned arrays?

Because they cloned it? It doesn't affect the original array. myvar = inputvar doesn't clone anything, it's just another variable name pointing to the same input array.

read my first reply in this thread

this is what's going on:

xs = [3, 2, 1]
solution(xs)
print(xs)  # should still say [3, 2, 1]

You DID mutate the original array. That is exactly what that test measures. It looks at the array before and after. That's also why it doesn't want you to mutate it. The caller doesn't want their stuff to be scrambled. Your method should look at it but not touch it.

The more general applicable advice here, I think, is that you should ensure that you can observe and reproduce whatever it is you are trying to fix. So that you KNOW it's happening. Not just for kata, but for any bug, or really anything that you're trying to change. Don't be blind, look at the thing you're doing.

It already says it in the description: "should return a new array ", and "it should not mutate the input array", etc.

sounds to me like you created a new variable instead of copying the array

Absolutely agree, more deserving of 6 kyu minimum