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

(senior-swe-bench.snorkel.ai)

35 points | by matt_d 2 hours ago ago

15 comments

  • purple-leafy an hour ago

    Benchmarks are great, but I feel like there’s a better way this seems quite subjective.

    What you really need is an objective benchmark

    • eli an hour ago

      I actually really like subjective benchmarks, so long as it's a human (ideally me) grading the results. LLM as judge never made much sense.

      • charcircuit 7 minutes ago

        The issue is that you can't do unsupervised learning if you require humans.

    • echelon an hour ago

      > What you really need is an objective benchmark

      "When are all the software engineers unemployed?"

  • jonathanleane 2 hours ago

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

    • lacunary an hour ago

      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?

  • guilhermecgs 12 minutes ago

    fable 5?

  • LiamPowell an hour ago

    > You are a senior SWE-Bench reviewer, make no mistakes.

    I don't know what a better approach would look like while still remaining feasible, however this approach of telling a LLM to make a subjective judgement seems fundamentally flawed.

  • Madmallard an hour ago

    next round of trust me bro benchmarks

    • dozerly 3 minutes ago

      Just wait for the next 100 rounds. People love seeing the 65% -> 85% seemingly over and over again for every new model.

  • danpalmer an hour ago

    Why didn't they just make it "Staff SWE-Bench", would be much better smh. /s

    But seriously, as an industry we're terrible at assessing engineering levels, I've worked with "senior engineers" who can't code and I've worked with "junior engineers" who could run rings around them.

    Benchmarks like this should be much more precise about what they're actually testing, and what axes they're hard on. We also need to rise above prompts like "you are a senior engineer", it's woo, and it's far better to ask for precise outcomes.

    • glaslong 15 minutes ago

      Principal-SWE-Bench will take some time to run, because the LLM needs to wait for a crisis to present its solution, having correctly identified that the same solution would have been organizationally impossible to propose until that moment.

    • amrrs an hour ago

      As someone who's trying to get better assessments, I'm struggling to come up with objective coding tasks that evaluates all aspects of real life like planning, design choices, problem solving and context usage. From your experience with humans, Do you have any recommendations on what could be effective in measuring it?

      • allan_s 35 minutes ago

        I think the source of your issue is in your statement itself, why do you want a task that evaluate things as broad to be only a coding task ? Shouldn't it be a planning task, documentation task, knowledge retrieval task etc. And very certainly not with just an initial prompt but an existing codebase + existing doc + tickets ?