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SWE-AGI: benchmarking spec-driven software construction (arxiv.org)
1 point by mustaphah 234 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: AI agents must build large programs—parsers, interpreters, solvers—from official rulebooks in a new language, so they can't copy existing code. The best finished 19 of 22 tasks, but struggled on the hardest, where reading the growing code became the main hurdle.

Abstract · SWE-AGI: Benchmarking Specification-Driven Software Construction with MoonBit in the Era of Autonomous Agents

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive coding capabilities, their ability to autonomously build production-scale software from explicit specifications remains an open question. We introduce SWE-AGI, an open-source benchmark for evaluating end-to-end, specification-driven construction of software systems written in MoonBit. SWE-AGI tasks require LLM-based agents to implement parsers, interpreters, binary decoders, and SAT solvers strictly from authoritative standards and RFCs under a fixed API scaffold. Each task involves implementing 1,000-10,000 lines of core logic, corresponding to weeks or months of engineering effort for an experienced human developer. By leveraging the nascent MoonBit ecosystem, SWE-AGI minimizes data leakage, forcing agents to rely on long-horizon architectural reasoning rather than code retrieval. Across frontier models, gpt-5.3-codex achieves the best overall performance (solving 19/22 tasks, 86.4%), outperforming claude-opus-4.6 (15/22, 68.2%), and kimi-2.5 exhibits the strongest performance among open-source models. Performance degrades sharply with increasing task difficulty, particularly on hard, specification-intensive systems. Behavioral analysis further reveals that as codebases scale, code reading, rather than writing, becomes the dominant bottleneck in AI-assisted development. Overall, while specification-driven autonomous software engineering is increasingly viable, substantial challenges remain before it can reliably support production-scale development.

Zhirui Zhang, Hongbo Zhang, Haoxiang Fei, Zhiyuan Bao, Yubin Chen, Zhengyu Lei, Ziyue Liu, Yixuan Sun, Mingkun Xiao, Zihang Ye, Yu Zhang, Hongcheng Zhu, et al.
arXiv:2602.09447 · cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Feb 10, 2026 · updated Feb 11, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 20 pages, 3 figures

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