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
AgentSWE is a new benchmark for agent software engineering that evaluates coding agents across three lifecycle stages: creating an agent from a natural‑language requirement, editing existing agent codebases, and optimizing toward a measurable target. The benchmark consists of 25 commission‑style tasks, where builders iterate on a few illustrative cases and are then tested on held‑out cases that cover the full requirement, with hard pass/fail gates or objective‑based grading. Experiments show that current coding agents fail to meet the requirements, revealing common failure modes such as overfitting, incomplete runtimes, and unsupported completion claims.
By Jiahao Wang, Hongjin Qian, Yuyang Hu, Jiajun Zhang, Zheng Liu
The paper investigates what makes software issue resolution tasks difficult for agents by proposing a measurement framework and conducting a large‑scale empirical study on the CoderForge‑Preview dataset. It extracts static features from task patches, repositories, and prompts, and uses ensemble methods, SHAP attribution, and effect size analysis to predict task outcomes. The study finds that task difficulty is largely predictable from static features (AU C = 0.863), driven mainly by patch fragmentation and repository scale, with prompt linguistic features contributing for mid‑band tasks, suggesting a layered difficulty structure.
By Ebtesam Al-Haque, Brittany Johnson
arXiv:2606. 17799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents have become a major mode of software engineering, but the benchmarks we use to compare them were designed in a pre-agent era: they collapse model, harness, and environment into a single end-to-end score, typically computed against one reference solution, with no component-level signal for iteration.
By Maria I. Gorinova, Macey Baker, Amy Heineike, Maksim Shaposhnikov, Rob Willoughby, Dru Knox
arXiv:2607. 03691v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Coding agents, autonomous systems that use large language models (LLMs) to resolve software engineering tasks, rely on agent harness: a middleware layer in between a developer and a large language model that orchestrates system prompts, tool execution, context management, and iterative reasoning loops.
By Oussama Ben Sghaier, Hao Li, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan
arXiv:2606.21804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Maintainability is a core dimension of software engineering, shaping how code is written, reviewed, and developed over time. While coding age...
By Shaswat Patel, Betty Li Hou, Arun Purohit, Kai Xu, Jane Pan, He He, Valerie Chen
arXiv:2610.35333v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Code agents have become increasingly capable of performing software engineering tasks through interaction with software environments. However, agents...
By Huanyu Liu, Yezheng Cheng, Jinliang You, Tianxiao Huang, Linyu Li, Zheng Fang, Peng Cao, Ge Li
The paper introduces CABRA, a synthetic benchmark that constructs coding tasks from scratch using call‑graph transformations and scales difficulty along four axes: function traversal, search, runtime resolution, and instruction following. Experiments with eight large language models and six coding agents on 6,840 CABRA tasks show that while LLM accuracy degrades with task size, agents maintain high performance by leveraging tools; larger tasks trigger more tool calls, and a separate study on SWE‑bench verifies that tool‑call counts better predict agent accuracy than lines of code edited. The authors argue that CABRA exposes weaknesses in LLMs that are hidden by tool use and highlights the importance of code‑understanding abilities beyond mere editing.
whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that coding agents’ performance is more dependent on code‑understanding than on the amount of code edited, revealing a critical bottleneck for current coding agents."
By Nishant Balepur, Kiran Tomlinson, Tobias Schnabel
The paper argues that evaluating agents as fixed models is insufficient, proposing instead to treat them as configurable systems. Using a new benchmark of four scientific tasks, the authors analyze how five configuration aspects—task information, reasoning, self‑verification, time budget, and backbone model—affect performance, noting that about 54% of outcome variance arises from run‑to‑run differences even with the same settings. The study finds that providing more task information has the strongest impact, while interactions among settings (e.g., extra time only helps with adequate information or model capability) and the choice of verification tools significantly shape agent behavior.
By Luis Wiedmann, Leander Girrbach, Cordelia Schmid, Zeynep Akata
SWE‑Duel proposes a self‑scaling benchmark for coding agents, where tasks and oracles are generated at evaluation time to prevent data leakage and adapt difficulty to participant performance. In the arena, two agents take turns as Red and Blue: Red proposes a feature, injects a subtle bug, and must repair it blind, while Blue reviews the pull request without knowing the bug and must pass all tests. A tournament of 11 model‑harness participants on 15 repositories across five languages showed GPT‑5.5/Codex CLI as the top solver and Claude Opus 4.8/mini‑swe‑agent as the top task author, with newer model versions producing harder tasks for older ones.
By Wei Minn, Zhensu Sun, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
arXiv:2606. 16988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores tell you what an agent got right; they do not tell you how it got there.
By Hamidah Oderinwale
arXiv:2609.38269v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Coding agents are increasingly asked to build software rather than patch it, yet benchmarks for from-scratch repository construction are mostly limit...
By Pei Yang, Tianyu Shi, Yuhang Yao, Wanyi Chen, Tongyun Yang, Dun Pei, Haonan Wang, Pengbin Feng, Guanxu Yu, Jingchun Huang, Zeyu Zhang, Shuhan Sun, Hao Li, Xiang Li, Jie Xiao, Xinyu Wang, Hanxin Chen, Daqi Li, Qi Jia, Hongshan Lin, Zhizhou Gu, Zijun Tian, Weizhi Du, Lynn Ai, Eric Yang