TestJack: Should you trust the results in coding benchmarks? Agentic Coding Benchmarks Auditing via Evaluator Evolution
cs.SE, cs.AI
Submitted: 2026-10-07
Updated: 2026-10-07
Code: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
The gist: Large language model (LLM) agents are rapidly reshaping software engineering, accompanied by an explosion of new code benchmarks.
Terminology
Abstract
Large language model (LLM) agents are rapidly reshaping software engineering, accompanied by an explosion of new code benchmarks. Yet nearly all existing benchmarks still rely on the same decades-old criterion: a solution is correct if it passes a fixed set of unit tests. Such tests are often insufficient: they check only part of what the task requires, so agents can reward hack them or silently miss required behavior while still passing every test. As a result, higher benchmark scores may partly reflect better adaptation to the evaluator rather than better problem solving. Existing works focus on static test augmentation: they strengthen each task's tests once, before any trial is seen, and thus overlook how real trials actually fail. We introduce TestJack, a scalable framework for evaluating patches beyond fixed tests. For each trial, TestJack generates tests targeting prompt requirements the patch may violate, retains only tests passed by the ground-truth patch, and re-examines any trial failures. Each confirmed failure is thus supported by a replayable test. To reduce evaluation cost, we also introduce a lightweight variant which audits a random sample of trials in depth and reuses the resulting tests across all trials for the same task. Across 6 frontier model backends and 5 benchmarks such as DeepSWE and SWE Marathon, we find that about 34.4% of the model trials currently judged correct violate the task requirements, lowering the overall resolution rate from 50.6% to 33.2%. Our results reveal a fundamental limitation of current coding-agent evaluation: as LLMs become better at optimizing against fixed evaluators, those evaluators themselves must become more adaptive.
Sources
- Otter: Generating Tests from Issues to Validate SWE Patches
- SWE-Bench+: Enhanced Coding Benchmark for LLMs
- Program Synthesis with Large Language Models
- SWE-rebench: An Automated Pipeline for Task Collection and Decontaminated Evaluation of Software Engineering Agents
- Code Benchmarks Should Prioritize Rigor, Reliability, and Reproducibility
- SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?
- Ask or Assume? Uncertainty-Aware Clarification-Seeking in Coding Agents
- Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding
- SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks
- Holistic Evaluation of Language Models
- Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models
- Who Guards the Benchmarks? Automated Auditing of LLM Agent Benchmarks
- Automated Benchmark Auditing for AI Agents and Large Language Models
- SWE-ABS: Adversarial Benchmark Strengthening Exposes Inflated Success Rates on Test-based Benchmark
- SWE-bench Goes Live!
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