2026
Coding Agents Have Converged: Why the SWE-bench Leaderboard Can No Longer Order Its Top Entries, and What to Measure Instead
The desk already carries SWE-bench from 2023, and this is the paper you should read immediately after it. A benchmark that can no longer separate its leaders has not stopped being useful, it has changed jobs: it is a regression floor now, not a ranking. The 29.8-point within-model scaffold spread is the number to remember, because it is larger than the whole spread across the top thirty entries. The harness you wrap around a model moves the score more than the model does.