[State of Code Evals] After SWE-bench, Code Clash & SOTA Coding Benchmarks recap — John Yang
Dec 31, 2025 · 17:45
John Yang, creator of SWE-bench, explains the benchmark's evolution from an ignored project to the industry standard after Cognition's Devin launch, and introduces CodeClash as a new paradigm for evaluating long-horizon coding agents via programming tournaments. Yang covers SWE-bench's expansion into nine languages (JavaScript, Rust, Java, C, Ruby) and multimodal tasks, the proliferation of independent variants like SWE-bench Pro and SWE-bench Live, and the shift from unit tests to iterative agent competitions. He addresses the Tau-bench controversy over impossible tasks, arguing they serve as cheat detection, and weighs the tension between long autonomy (5-hour runs) and interactivity (Cognition's fast back-and-forth). Yang highlights the academic data problem—companies like Cognition have rich user interaction data, while academics need user simulators or compelling products like LMArena—and positions CodeClash as a testbed for studying human-AI collaboration by freezing model capability and varying interaction setups.
