mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

EvoCode-Bench: Evaluating Coding Agents in Multi-Turn Iterative Interactions

arXiv 2605.24110 ↗First posted 22 May 2026cs.AIcited by 6

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Coding agents are increasingly used as iterative development partners, but most benchmarks still evaluate one specification followed by one final assessment. This leaves out a basic question: can an agent keep its own codebase working as requirements change? We introduce EvoCode-Bench, a benchmark of 26 stateful coding tasks and 227 evaluated rounds. Each task preserves the agent's workspace for 5-15 rounds, states requirements through observable behavior, and uses cumulative executable tests to check new requirements and still-active prior ones. We evaluate 13 coding agents with two metrics: MT@4, a four-attempt fail-stop multi-round score, and SR, a single-round score from a reference-completed prior state. For most agents, SR exceeds MT@4 by 22-40 points. The gap also changes rankings: the highest-SR agent (78.9) ranks only third in persistent execution (44.0 MT@4). Even the strongest agents achieve only about 50% success on multi-turn metrics, and aggregate pass rate drops below half of round-1 performance by round 5. Failure analysis shows tier-dependent behavior: weaker agents fail early, while stronger agents survive long enough to expose specification-tracking and regression failures. We release the benchmark data and Harbor multi-turn infrastructure.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 29 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 May 2026.

Builds on

29 of 38 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025NL2Repo-Bench: Towards Long-Horizon Repository Generation Evaluation of Coding Agents14 Dec
  2. 2025Doc2Feat-Bench: Evaluating Documentation-Driven Feature Addition24 Jul
  3. 2024Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gym30 Dec
  4. 2024AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agents26 Jul
  5. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
  6. 2024Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents1 Jul
  7. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering6 May

Other references · 22

  1. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  2. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
  3. 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,509
  4. 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 1,906
  5. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  6. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,211
  7. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  8. 2024BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructionscited by 527
  9. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
  10. 2023LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Datasetcited by 449
  11. 2025LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversationcited by 400
  12. 2023RepoBench: Benchmarking Repository-Level Code Auto-Completion Systemscited by 346
10 more
  1. 2024AutoCodeRover: Autonomous Program Improvementcited by 272
  2. 2024ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilitiescited by 272
  3. 2024MT-Eval: A Multi-Turn Capabilities Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Modelscited by 78
  4. 2024EvoCodeBench: An Evolving Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositoriescited by 71
  5. 2024DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositoriescited by 71
  6. 2024CodeS: Natural Language to Code Repository via Multi-Layer Sketchcited by 28
  7. 2024On the Impacts of Contexts on Repository-Level Code Generationcited by 21
  8. 2025CodeFlowBench: A Multi-turn, Iterative Benchmark for Complex Code Generationcited by 16
  9. 2025SWE-Dev: Evaluating and Training Autonomous Feature-Driven Software Developmentcited by 13
  10. 2025Benchmarking Correctness and Security in Multi-Turn Code Generationcited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SlopCodeBench: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Degrade Over Long-Horizon Iterative Tasks
  2. 2025SWE-EVO: Benchmarking Coding Agents in Long-Horizon Software Evolution Scenarios
  3. 2026LoopsBench: From Harness Engineering to Loop Engineering in Coding Agent Evaluation
  4. 2026SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User Sessions
  5. 2026PERFOPT-Bench: Evaluating Coding Agents on Software Performance Optimization
  6. 2026Understanding the Architecture of Coding Agents: An Exploratory Study Using a Research Prototype
  7. 2026ProjDevBench: Benchmarking AI Coding Agents on End-to-End Project Development
  8. 2026SWE-INTERACT: Reimagining SWE Benchmarks as User-Driven Long-Horizon Coding Sessions