There are upcoming benchmarks aimed at measuring the ability to work with brownfield tasks. (Of course, benchmarks can be gamed, but they are still better than unrealistic toy tasks that earlier generations of benchmarks used. Frontier labs are yet to use them in their tech reports or marketing material, though.:-) * SWE-EVO: Benchmarking Coding Agents in Long-Horizon Software Evolution Scenarios https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18470 * SWE-CI: Evaluating Agent Capabilities in Maintaining Codebases via Continuous Integration https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03823
SWE-CI: Evaluating Agent Capabilities in Maintaining Codebases via Continuous Integration
Jialong Chen, Xander Xu, Hu Wei, Chuan Chen, Bing Zhao
2026 · arXiv
- HN score
- 0
- Mentions
- 3
- Readers
- 3
- Months
- 3
From the abstract
Large language model (LLM)-powered agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in automating software engineering tasks such as static bug fixing. However, in the real world, the development of mature software is typically predicated on complex requirement changes and long-term feature iterations -- a process that static, one-shot repair paradigms fail to capture. To bridge this gap, we propose SWE-CI, the first repository-level benchmark built upon the Continuous Integration loop, aiming to shift the evaluation paradigm for code generation from static, short-term functional correctness toward dynamic, long-term maintainability. The key insight is simple: Maintainability can be revealed by tracking how functional correctness changes over time. The benchmark comprises 100 tasks, each deriving from a real-world code repository with a development history spanning an average of 233 days and 71 consecutive commits. SWE-CI requires agents to systematically resolve these tasks through dozens of rounds of analysis and coding iterations. SWE-CI provides valuable insights into how well agents can sustain code quality throughout long-term evolution.
Metadata: arXiv. Abstracts retain their original authors’ rights.
In the conversation
Original HN comments, with labels from simple text rules. A label describes the whole comment and may miss context or irony. Read the discussion to make up your own mind. About the labels
3 selected excerpts · 3 total mentions
Nah, it's a skill issue on the part of those who believe in "agent swarms" (in fact, that's how I recognise AI noobs; they think swarms work). Studies (like this [1]) and Anthropic's experiements have told us they don't. We do experiments with software correctness and formal methods experts who actually dive deep into "swarm outputs" and try to put evolutionary pressure on them. Swarms simply cannot (yet) produce viable software. They do, however, produce software that for a while passes tests. What I think is happening is that people who believe swarms work just look at test results. But obviously, every software engineer has known for decades that tests can only tell you if your software works today; they can't tell you that it will work tomorrow. And the people who say that unreviewed agent output will work tomorrow are those who didn't review it closely enough, so they have no idea, either. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03823
The study is likely "SWE-CI: Evaluating Agent Capabilities in Maintaining Codebases via Continuous Integration". Regression rate plot is figure 6. Read the study to understand what it is measuring and how it was measured. As I understand parent's summary is fine, but you want to understand it first before repeating it to others. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03823
Keep following the thread.
More in Language modelsMore from the same topics.
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
Sébastien Bubeck, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan +11
Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition.
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder +28
Recent work has demonstrated substantial gains on many NLP tasks and benchmarks by pre-training on a large corpus of text followed by fine-tuning on a specific task.
Copy-and-Patch Compilation: A fast compilation algorithm for high-level languages and bytecode
Haoran Xu, Fredrik Kjolstad
Fast compilation is important when compilation occurs at runtime, such as query compilers in modern database systems and WebAssembly virtual machines in modern browsers.
Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections
Luca Beurer-Kellner, Beat Buesser, Ana-Maria Creţu +11
As AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly versatile and capable of addressing a broad spectrum of tasks, ensuring their security has become a critical challenge.