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LongCLI-Bench

What it is

LongCLI-Bench is a preliminary benchmark and study focused on evaluating AI agents in long-horizon programming tasks within command-line interfaces (CLIs). It measures an agent's ability to plan and execute multi-step engineering workflows.

What problem it solves

It addresses the gap in agent evaluation for realistic software engineering tasks. Most existing benchmarks are limited by short horizons, data contamination, or lack of fine-grained metrics. LongCLI-Bench tests agents on complex, multi-step tasks fromCS assignments and real-world workflows, highlighting failures in planning and long-term execution.

Where it fits in the stack

Eval: It is a specialized benchmark for evaluating the Agentic and Execution layers of AI coding systems.

Typical use cases

  • Coding Assistant Benchmarking: Testing tools like Aider or OpenHands on complex, multi-tool tasks.
  • Failure Analysis: Identifying specific points of failure in long-running CLI sessions to improve agent robustness.
  • Human-Agent Collaboration Study: Evaluating how plan injection and guidance from humans can improve agent success rates.

Strengths

  • Long-Horizon focus: Specifically targets tasks that require sustained reasoning and multiple sequential actions.
  • Step-Level Scoring: Pinpoints exactly where an agent stalls or deviates from the task requirements.
  • Realistic Tasks: Includes "from scratch" development, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring scenarios.

Limitations

  • CLI-Centric: Focused on terminal interactions, which may not capture all agentic modalities.
  • Nascent Benchmark: As a preliminary study, it may still be expanding its set of evaluation instances.

When to use it

  • When testing agents designed for autonomous coding or system administration.
  • When you need a more rigorous evaluation of an agent's ability to follow complex, multi-step instructions without stalling.

When not to use it

  • For testing general chat capabilities or single-turn information retrieval.
  • When evaluation does not involve terminal or shell access.

Sources / references