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SWE Refactor Bench: Can Coding Agents Complete a Long-Horizon, Whole-Repository Stack Migration?

L5 · ResearcherResearcharXiv· 8/24/2026

Provides rigorous empirical analysis of frontier models' ability to perform complex software refactoring tasks, which is critical for AI coding agent research and development.

AI Summary

Researchers introduce SWE Refactor Bench, a new for evaluating coding agents on long-horizon, whole-repository stack migrations, finding current models struggle with only 5.4% of runs achieving full success.

Excerpt

Modern software systems accumulate technical debt over decades of development, which makes migration expensive and largely manual. As coding agents become increasingly capable at bug fixing, can they autonomously perform such migrations? Existing benchmarks cannot answer this question because they evaluate only behavioural correctness, not whether the migration actually occurred. This leads an easy hack: agents copy the original implementation to make tests pass. We call this Blindness. To addre

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