arXiv AI

SlackBench: Benchmarking Agents on Collaborative Projects Grounded in Real Code Repositories

SlackBench is a new benchmark that evaluates AI agents on realistic collaborative research and engineering workflows, requiring joint reasoning over workplace communication and evolving repository state. The benchmark is built from privacy‑preserving reenactments of real academic projects, providing reproducible environments with multi‑party dialogue, code changes from GitHub, and Google Docs. It contains 140 queries covering heterogeneous‑source search, abstention, summarization, and inference over long conversations, and shows that current models perform well below the ceiling, indicating significant room for improvement.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 28

Choosing Coding-Agent Benchmarks for Practice: Lessons from Task Demands and Agent Behaviour

The paper analyzes 2,487 tasks from five public coding‑agent benchmarks and 14,922 runs of six agent configurations, introducing the Spread‑Novelty‑Centrality (SNC) profile to describe how reference solutions are distributed, added, and the code’s dependencies, history, and complexity. It finds that every pair of benchmarks differs on at least two SNC axes, even when sharing the same task label, and that resolved runs tend to involve less distributed changes and lower centrality values, with patch sizes varying between Claude and Qwen configurations. The authors recommend that practitioners choose evaluation tasks based on change characteristics, inspect task descriptions, and assess patch scope alongside test outcomes to better align benchmarks with real‑world workloads.

By Radin Shayanfar, Keheliya Gallaba, Ahmed E. Hassan
arXiv AI
Oct 26

What Open-Source Projects Tell Their Coding Agents: A Census of AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md

The study surveys popular, active GitHub repositories across thirteen languages, treating each repository’s AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files as instruction sets for coding agents. It finds that most repositories include such instructions, with CLAUDE.md often referencing AGENTS.md, and that these files contain a mix of project knowledge and workflow rules, including varying stances on AI attribution. The analysis reveals that more popular projects tend to have stricter pull‑request rules and AI contribution guidelines, and that LLM and agent projects are over‑represented among adopters.

By Pawel Zarzycki
arXiv AI
Jun 30

SWE-fficiency: Can Language Models Optimize Real-World Repositories on Real Workloads?

arXiv:2511. 06090v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optimizing the performance of large-scale software repositories demands expertise in code reasoning and software engineering (SWE) to reduce runtime while preserving program correctness.

By Jeffrey Jian Ma, Milad Hashemi, Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Kevin Swersky, Ofir Press, Enhui Li, Vijay Janapa Reddi, Parthasarathy Ranganathan
arXiv AI
Oct 19

Explore Separately, Adopt Selectively: Execution-Guided Tool Use over Large Tool Libraries

The paper introduces BRIA (BRanch-Inspect-Adopt), an agent that isolates tool‑candidate investigations into separate branches, executing each candidate independently and then inspecting the execution evidence to adopt only useful results. BRIA dynamically retrieves additional tools as new needs arise during task execution and is evaluated on PlanBench‑XL and MCP‑Atlas with a library of 1,897 tools, outperforming or matching the strongest retrieval baselines. On MCP‑Atlas, BRIA achieves an average claim score of 89.77 versus 75.40 for MCP‑Zero, and it lies on the Pareto frontier for task performance and input‑token cost.

By Anna Mazhar, Seiji Maekawa, Nikita Bhutani