Zero2Repo: Can Coding Agents Build Repositories from Scratch?
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Coding agents are increasingly asked to build software rather than patch it, yet benchmarks for from-scratch repository construction are mostly limited to a single language and depend on manually curated tasks. We introduce Zero2Repo, a benchmark in which an agent receives a product requirements document, an interface contract, and an empty workspace, and must deliver a complete repository in the project's native ecosystem. Tasks are produced by a language-agnostic authoring pipeline that converts real, version-pinned open-source projects into behavioral specifications, reproducible environments, and hidden acceptance tests. Each task is validated by execution: a reference implementation derived from the upstream project must pass, and adversarial validation must show that the tests reject incorrect implementations. Evaluation runs production coding agents in isolated containers, withholds the acceptance tests until an explicit submission, and assigns a binary reward only when every test passes, with no LLM judge. The pipeline and harness make no language-specific assumptions and apply to mainstream programming ecosystems; the current release contains Python, TypeScript, Go, and C++ tasks. Even on 11 tasks drawn from repositories that frontier models have very likely seen during training, the strongest agent solves only 10, and every failing submission passes 90-99% of the hidden tests; for the two strongest agents, 67-100% of failed tests trace to a single omission or a low-frequency rule stated in the specification rather than to a missing subsystem, so each failure is a concrete target for improvement.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 15 of its 17 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.
Builds on
15 of 17 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2026SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User Sessions29 Jun
- 2026RepoZero: Can LLMs Generate a Code Repository from Scratch?8 May
- 2025NL2Repo-Bench: Towards Long-Horizon Repository Generation Evaluation of Coding Agents14 Dec
Other references · 12
- 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
- 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,509
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
- 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 1,906
- 2024BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructionscited by 527
- 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
- 2023RepoBench: Benchmarking Repository-Level Code Auto-Completion Systemscited by 346
- 2023CrossCodeEval: A Diverse and Multilingual Benchmark for Cross-File Code Completioncited by 181
- 2025Multi-SWE-bench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Issue Resolvingcited by 165
- 2024Commit0: Library Generation from Scratchcited by 50
- 2025Automated Benchmark Generation for Repository-Level Coding Taskscited by 27
- 2026RepoGenesis: Benchmarking End-to-End Microservice Generation from Readme to Repositorycited by 8
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- 2026Repo0: Design-Driven Zero-to-All Code Generation
- 2026RepoMod-Bench: A Benchmark for Code Repository Modernization via Implementation-Agnostic Testing
- 2025GitTaskBench: A Benchmark for Code Agents Solving Real-World Tasks Through Code Repository Leveraging
- 2026Correct Code, Broken Contributions? SWE-CC: Benchmarking Repository Policy Compliance for Coding Agents
- 2026Govern the Repository, Not the Agent: Measuring Ecosystem-Level Risk in AI-Native Software
- 2026An Exploratory Study of Agent Plans for Agentic AI Coding Tools in Open-Source Software