TerminalWorld: Benchmarking Agents on Real-World Terminal Tasks
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Abstract (arXiv)
We introduce TerminalWorld, a scalable data engine that automatically reverse-engineers high-fidelity evaluation tasks from "in-the-wild" terminal recordings. Processing 80,870 terminal recordings, the engine yields a full benchmark of 1,530 validated tasks, spanning 18 real-world categories, ranging from short everyday operations to workflows exceeding 50 steps, and covering 1,280 unique commands. From these, we curate a Verified subset of 200 representative, manually reviewed tasks. Comprehensive benchmarking on TerminalWorld-Verified across eight frontier models and six agents reveals that current systems still struggle with authentic terminal workflows, achieving a maximum pass rate of only 62.5%. Moreover, TerminalWorld captures real-world terminal capabilities distinct from existing expert-curated benchmarks (e.g., Terminal-Bench), with only a weak correlation to their scores (Pearson r=0.20). The automated engine makes TerminalWorld authentic and scalable by construction, enabling it to evaluate agents in real-world terminal environments as developer practices evolve. Data and code are available at https://github.com/EuniAI/TerminalWorld.
Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 11 of its 18 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.
Builds on
11 of 18 references.
References · 11
- 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineeringcited by 1,737
- 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agentscited by 1,002
- 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 585
- 2023InterCode: Standardizing and Benchmarking Interactive Coding with Execution Feedbackcited by 238
- 2018NL2Bash: A Corpus and Semantic Parser for Natural Language Interface to the Linux Operating Systemcited by 98
- 2026Endless Terminals: Scaling RL Environments for Terminal Agentscited by 54
- 2026On Data Engineering for Scaling LLM Terminal Capabilitiescited by 43
- 2026LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfacescited by 34
- 2026Large-Scale Terminal Agentic Trajectory Generation from Dockerized Environmentscited by 33
- 2026TermiGen: High-Fidelity Environment and Robust Trajectory Synthesis for Terminal Agentscited by 29
- 2026CLI-Gym: Scalable CLI Task Generation via Agentic Environment Inversioncited by 23
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 10.
10 papers.
- 2026Failure as a Process: An Anatomy of CLI Coding Agent Trajectoriescited by 13
- 2026DarwinX: Evolving Agent Harnesses Through Natural Selectioncited by 13
- 2026TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agentscited by 9
- 2026FACET: Preserving Source Intent and Executable State in Terminal Task Synthesiscited by 9
- 2026CalibForge: Adversarial Solver Calibration for Scaling Learnable Terminal Taskscited by 8
- 2026Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agentscited by 2
- 2026Coupling Planning with Episodic Memory in LLM Agents for Software Issue Resolutioncited by 1
- 2026QuoteBench: How Matched Scores Can Hide Command-Path Failurescited by 1
- 2026Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environmentscited by 1
- 2026HPP: Hierarchical Programmatic Probing for Long Video Understanding by Decoupling Perception and Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agents23 Aug 2026
- 2026Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environments20 Aug 2026
- 2026FACET: Preserving Source Intent and Executable State in Terminal Task Synthesis19 Aug 2026
- 2026QuoteBench: How Matched Scores Can Hide Command-Path Failures13 Aug 2026
- 2026Coupling Planning with Episodic Memory in LLM Agents for Software Issue Resolution7 Aug 2026
- 2026CalibForge: Adversarial Solver Calibration for Scaling Learnable Terminal Tasks6 Aug 2026
- 2026DarwinX: Evolving Agent Harnesses Through Natural Selection31 Jul 2026
- 2026Failure as a Process: An Anatomy of CLI Coding Agent Trajectories10 Jul 2026
- 2026TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents26 Jun 2026
- 2026HPP: Hierarchical Programmatic Probing for Long Video Understanding by Decoupling Perception and Reasoning19 Jun 2026