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RoadmapBench: Evaluating Long-Horizon Agentic Software Development Across Version Upgrades
RoadmapBench highlights that even leading frontier AI models currently fail to resolve most complex, long-horizon software engineering tasks.
What: The benchmark evaluates AI agents on 115 real-world version upgrade tasks requiring modification of thousands of lines of code across 51 files, finding that even Claude-Opus-4.7 only resolves 39.1% of tasks.
Why it matters: Most current benchmarks focus on isolated bug fixes, which significantly misrepresents the difficulty of real-world enterprise software development.
Decoder
- Long-horizon task: A development task requiring many steps, coordination across files, and significant time to complete, rather than a simple 'fix'.
Original article
RoadmapBench: Evaluating Long-Horizon Agentic Software Development Across Version Upgrades
Coding agents are increasingly deployed in real software development, where a single version iteration requires months of coordinated work across many files. However, most existing benchmarks focus predominantly on single-issue bug fixes from Python repositories, with coarse pass/fail evaluation outcomes, and thus fail to capture long-horizon, multi-target development at real engineering scale. To address this gap, we present RoadmapBench, a benchmark of 115 long-horizon coding tasks grounded in real open-source version upgrades across 17 repositories and 5 programming languages. Each task places the agent on a source-version code snapshot and provides a multi-target roadmap instruction requiring it to implement the functionality introduced in the target version, with a median modification of 3,700 lines across 51 files. We conduct a systematic evaluation on thirteen frontier models and find that even the strongest, Claude-Opus-4.7, resolves only 39.1% of tasks, while the weakest achieves merely 5.2%, in stark contrast to existing bug-fix benchmarks, suggesting that long-horizon software development remains a largely unsolved problem.
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