# AppForge: From Assistant to Independent Developer -- Are GPTs Ready for Software Development?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07740 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07740/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07974/) (2024)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07814/) (2022)
- [Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01210/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15877/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Using Large Language Models for Automated Unit Test Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06527/) (2023)
- [Multi-lingual Evaluation of Code Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14868/) (2022)
- [CodePlan: Repository-level Coding using LLMs and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12499/) (2023)
- [Keep the Conversation Going: Fixing 162 out of 337 bugs for 0.42 each using ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00385/) (2023)
- [Self-planning Code Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06689/) (2023)
- [InferFix: End-to-End Program Repair with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07263/) (2023)
- [ReCode: Robustness Evaluation of Code Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10264/) (2022)
- [ChatUniTest: A Framework for LLM-Based Test Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04764/) (2023)
- [HumanEval-XL: A Multilingual Code Generation Benchmark for Cross-lingual Natural Language Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16694/) (2024)
- [SWE-bench Goes Live!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23419/) (2025)
- [Code-Aware Prompting: A study of Coverage Guided Test Generation in Regression Setting using LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00097/) (2024)
- [Web-Bench: A LLM Code Benchmark Based on Web Standards and Frameworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07473/) (2025)
- [TRUCE: Private Benchmarking to Prevent Contamination and Improve Comparative Evaluation of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00393/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Benchmarking of Reasoning Capabilities in Code Large Language Models Under Data Contamination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04149/) (2025)
- [STALL+: Boosting LLM-based Repository-level Code Completion with Static Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10018/) (2024)
- [Inference-Time Decontamination: Reusing Leaked Benchmarks for Large Language Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13990/) (2024)
- [LAMD: Context-driven Android Malware Detection and Classification with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13055/) (2025)
- [CodeFuse-13B: A Pretrained Multi-lingual Code Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06266/) (2023)
- [KGym: A Platform and Dataset to Benchmark Large Language Models on Linux Kernel Crash Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02680/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [GUI-GENESIS: Automated Synthesis of Efficient Environments with Verifiable Rewards for GUI Agent Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14093/) (2026)
- [On the Adoption of AI Coding Agents in Open-source Android and iOS Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12144/) (2026)
- [Compiling Large Multi-Modal Requirement Documents into Runnable Software Systems: From an Agentic Test-Driven Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13723/) (2026)
- [RecreationWorld: Scalable and Verifiable Environments for Hybrid Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22000/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in function-level code generation tasks. Unlike isolated functions, real-world applications demand reasoning over the entire software system: developers must orchestrate how different components interact, maintain consistency across states over time, and ensure the application behaves correctly within the lifecycle and framework constraints. Yet, no existing benchmark adequately evaluates whether LLMs can bridge this gap and construct entire software systems from scratch. To address this gap, we propose APPFORGE, a benchmark consisting of 101 software development problems drawn from real-world Android apps. Given a natural language specification detailing the app functionality, a language model is tasked with implementing the functionality into an Android app from scratch. Developing an Android app from scratch requires understanding and coordinating app states, lifecycle management, and asynchronous operations, calling for LLMs to generate context-aware, robust, and maintainable code. To construct APPFORGE, we design a multi-agent system to automatically summarize the main functionalities from app documents and navigate the app to synthesize test cases validating the functional correctness of app implementation. Following rigorous manual verification by Android development experts, APPFORGE incorporates the test cases within an automated evaluation framework that enables reproducible assessment without human intervention, making it easily adoptable for future research. Our evaluation on 12 flagship LLMs show that all evaluated models achieve low effectiveness, with the best-performing model (GPT-5) developing only 18.8% functionally correct applications, highlighting fundamental limitations in current models' ability to handle complex, multi-component software engineering challenges.