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Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers

senior-swe-bench.snorkel.ai

21–30 of 130 posts

Re: Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers

#21
post #4

Top solve rate is currently 24% with Opus 4.8... What's a competent human supposed to score?

presumably whatever the top model uses and then some, since the human can use the model. I wonder if a model could score higher if it had a human at its disposal?

Maybe models should ask for human-in-the-loop input, as a matter of convention.

Re: Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers

#25
post #23

This makes so much sense as to why I've always felt that Opus 4.8 was leagues ahead of GPT 5.5. It's so good at taking underspecified requirements and filling in the gaps with sensible approaches for your project

> It's so good at taking underspecified requirements and filling in the gaps with sensible approaches for your project.

At a high level. It misses low level or other non-functional requirements differently so I wouldn't say Opus is just strictly better.

It's also possible that it's just a harness problem more than model.

Re: Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers

#26

The "tasteful solves" is codified cargo culting. The software industry has a tendency to anthropomorphize software while playing to the ego of the programmer. The programmer imagines they are creating a "beautiful" artistic expression. Good code becomes "tasteful", as a software artist must have "good taste" to tell the good software from the bad software. Good quality lacks "bad smells", because a good artist has fi…

As time passes we will have fewer and fewer literati

Re: Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers

#27

Once again I am asking: who are these people and what makes them more qualified than any of you to asses anyone or anything "as a senior engineer" (with the subtext being that none of you are, either)

> who are these people and what makes them more qualified than any of you

Anyone can run something and make a web page. These people just do it instead of questioning. Main difference. If everyone asks "how could you" "are you qualified" then we have nothing but gatekeeping.

Re: Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers

#28

The "tasteful solves" is codified cargo culting. The software industry has a tendency to anthropomorphize software while playing to the ego of the programmer. The programmer imagines they are creating a "beautiful" artistic expression. Good code becomes "tasteful", as a software artist must have "good taste" to tell the good software from the bad software. Good quality lacks "bad smells", because a good artist has fi…

Most engineers are wrong (I obviously am the true arbiter of taste), but that doesn't mean there isn't better and worse code.

"Does it work" glosses over a bunch of things: is it fast, cheap, secure, reliable, easy to understand, easy to modify? And that's just for server software where you've nailed down all the functional requirements. Determining what the functional requirements is it's own question.

And all these other non-happy path requirements are somewhat in tension with each other, so what is ideal in one environment is not necessarily ideal in another.

And in particular, "easy to understand/modify" is truly subjective. Different people have different ideas of what easy to understand means. Even if we get to a world where AI is writing all our code, "easy to understand/modify for the AI" is still an important question. We've probably all seen prototypes that collapse under their own weight of slop by now.

Re: Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers

#29
post #25
post #23

This makes so much sense as to why I've always felt that Opus 4.8 was leagues ahead of GPT 5.5. It's so good at taking underspecified requirements and filling in the gaps with sensible approaches for your project

> It's so good at taking underspecified requirements and filling in the gaps with sensible approaches for your project. At a high level. It misses low level or other non-functional requirements differently so I wouldn't say Opus is just strictly better. It's also possible that it's just a harness problem more than model.

I agree with you on the harness. I find that Claude can be good in any harness but GPT is only superior inside Codex.

Re: Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers

#30
post #20

I saw on Twitter that in an ML course at Tsinghua University, one of the tests asks students to write quizzes that fail the most LLM models as possible. What if we create a benchmark that works like this and assigns ELO scores? Models fight head-to-head by writing a question, a bug, or an incomplete implementation, which the opponent has to answer, fix, or finish.

We could call this "generative adversarial network" (GAN) :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

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