SWE Refactor Bench: Can Coding Agents Complete a Long-Horizon, Whole-Repository Stack Migration?
Researchers have created a benchmark called SWE Refactor Bench to test the ability of coding agents to perform long-horizon, whole-repository stack migrations. The benchmark consists of 20 migration tasks that cover four types of technical debt and evaluates both migration completeness and behavioral correctness. In a series of experiments using eight frontier models and various model-effort configurations, only 5.4% of the runs passed all three evaluation stages, highlightin
Researchers have created a benchmark called SWE Refactor Bench to test the ability of coding agents to perform long-horizon, whole-repository stack migrations. The benchmark consists of 20 migration tasks that cover four types of technical debt and evaluates both migration completeness and behavioral correctness. In a series of experiments using eight frontier models and various model-effort configurations, only 5.4% of the runs passed all three evaluation stages, highlighting the challenges in developing coding agents for reliable whole-repository migrations.
---
Why it matters: This research matters to engineers working on AI-powered software development tools because it sheds light on the limitations of current coding agents in performing complex migration tasks. Understanding these limitations is crucial for developing more robust and reliable AI-driven solutions for software maintenance and evolution.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23564
This article was originally published at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23564