arXiv AI By Aditya Golatkar, Alessandro Achille, Renos Zabounidis, Vlad Sobal, Yangruibo Ding, Baishakhi Ray, Jonathan Buck, Guy Van den Broeck, Maryam Fazel, Pietro Perona, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto

Skeleton Coding: Program Structure as a Specification for Agents

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The paper introduces Skeleton Coding, a method where developers jointly specify a program’s structure—its data types, modules, and functions—alongside behavioral tests. This approach allows the agent to first commit to a structure, narrowing the search space of possible programs, and then use tests to select the correct implementation. Empirical results across multiple models and benchmarks show that skeletons can dramatically reduce the number of required tests, improve accuracy, and lower implementation costs.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Oct 12

AgentSWE: Can Coding Agents Build the Agent You Actually Want?

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
arXiv AI
5d ago

Benchmarking LLM Agents for Behaviorally Adequate Test Generation from Software Requirements

The paper introduces Req2Test-Bench, a benchmark of 5,086 instances linking natural‑language Gherkin requirements to developer‑written test implementations across five languages and four BDD frameworks. It evaluates eight agent–model–reasoning setups, finding that while the best configuration (Codex with DeepSeek‑V4.1‑Flash) produces passing tests for 82.8% of cases, only 33.8% are behaviorally adequate, as measured by kill‑completeness. The study highlights diminishing returns from scaling agents, the impact of under‑specified requirements, and the potential of requirement‑grounded harnesses to improve test generation.

By Binhang Qi, Yiming Liu, Yun Lin, Yangjie Zhou, Hailong Sun, Jin Song Dong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

SpecFirst: Behavioral Specification Elicitation as a First-Class Step in Agent-Based Program Synthesis from Scratch

LLM-based agents excel at software engineering tasks where an existing codebase provides context, but constructing a program from scratch remains fundamentally harder. Recent benchmarks such as ProgramBench quantify this gap: given only natural-language documentation and an execute-only binary as a behavioral oracle, even frontier models solve fewer than 1% of instances.

arXiv AI
Oct 1

E2E-SWE: Benchmarking LLMs on Building Working Codebases from Scratch

E2E-SWE is a benchmark that tests large language models’ ability to create complete, functional software repositories from scratch. It includes 186 tasks across 11 programming languages, each requiring an agent to build an installable project based solely on a natural‑language specification and an empty workspace, while passing a hidden test suite. The benchmark was crafted by software engineers and LLMs, then refined through iterative verification by autonomous agents to ensure clarity and solvability.

By Hantian Ding, Chloe Bi, Jiacheng Zhu, John Yang, Matt Deitke, Pengcheng Yin, Zijian Wang, Rui Hou