RepoForge: Training a SOTA Fast-thinking SWE Agent with an End-to-End Data Curation Pipeline Synergizing SFT and RL at Scale

Training software engineering (SWE) LLMs is bottlenecked by expensive infrastructure, inefficient evaluation pipelines, scarce training data, and costly quality control. We present RepoForge, an autonomous, end-to-end pipeline that generates, evaluates, and trains SWE agents at scale. Our key contributions include: (1) RepoForge-8B-Agent, achieving 17.4% on SWE-Bench-Verified~citepswebenchverified2024, establishing new state-of-the-art for ≤8B non-thinking LLMs; (2) 7,304 executable environments auto-generated from real GitHub commits with zero manual intervention; (3) 14× storage reduction (1.4GB rightarrow 102MB per instance) via intelligent dependency management and image pruning; (4) >70% faster evaluation using a Ray-powered~citepray2018 distributed RepoForge harness; (5) 19,000× cheaper labeling through our automated SPICE~citepspice2024 difficulty assessment technique. By unifying storage-efficient sandboxing, Ray-powered evaluation harness, automated data generation, SPICE-based labeling, and bubble-free RL scaffold, we demonstrate that even ≤8B models can reach new state-of-the-art performance on demanding benchmarks like SWE-Bench-Verified. Our approach addresses critical bottlenecks in SWE agent training: high storage costs of container-based evaluation, inefficient sequential reward pipelines, limited availability of high-quality training data, expensive manual labeling, and multi-turn RL pipeline bottlenecks.