Can Coding Agents Build Agents? AgentSWE Benchmark Exposes Severe Meta-Engineering Delivery Gaps
As software engineering shifts toward autonomous coding agents, delegating the creation of specialized agents is becoming routine. The AgentSWE benchmark establishes the first systematic evaluation of agent software engineering across three lifecycle stages: Creation, Editing, and Optimization. Findings reveal a pronounced gap between prototype demonstration and held-out test acceptance across leading frontier models.
Key Takeaways
- First benchmark for agent software engineering: covers Creation, Editing, and Optimization across 25 real-world commission tasks
- Rigorous commission-based evaluation: tests frozen submissions on held-out cases with hard pass/fail gates rather than superficial unit passes
- Exposes systemic failure modes: reveals widespread overfitting to visible prompts, hollow runtimes behind complete syntax, and unsupported completion claims