Paper
NL2Repo-Bench: Towards Long-Horizon Repository Generation Evaluation of Coding Agents
Authors
Jingzhe Ding, Shengda Long, Changxin Pu, Huan Zhou, Hongwan Gao, Xiang Gao, Chao He, Yue Hou, Fei Hu, Zhaojian Li, Weiran Shi, Zaiyuan Wang, Daoguang Zan, Chenchen Zhang, Xiaoxu Zhang, Qizhi Chen, Xianfu Cheng, Bo Deng, Qingshui Gu, Kai Hua, Juntao Lin, Pai Liu, Mingchen Li, Xuanguang Pan, Zifan Peng, Yujia Qin, Yong Shan, Zhewen Tan, Weihao Xie, Zihan Wang, Yishuo Yuan, Jiayu Zhang, Enduo Zhao, Yunfei Zhao, He Zhu, Chenyang Zou, Ming Ding, Jianpeng Jiao, Jiaheng Liu, Minghao Liu, Qian Liu, Chongyao Tao, Jian Yang, Tong Yang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Xinjie Chen, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang
Abstract
Recent advances in coding agents suggest rapid progress toward autonomous software development, yet existing benchmarks fail to rigorously evaluate the long-horizon capabilities required to build complete software systems. Most prior evaluations focus on localized code generation, scaffolded completion, or short-term repair tasks, leaving open the question of whether agents can sustain coherent reasoning, planning, and execution over the extended horizons demanded by real-world repository construction. To address this gap, we present NL2Repo Bench, a benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate the long-horizon repository generation ability of coding agents. Given only a single natural-language requirements document and an empty workspace, agents must autonomously design the architecture, manage dependencies, implement multi-module logic, and produce a fully installable Python library. Our experiments across state-of-the-art open- and closed-source models reveal that long-horizon repository generation remains largely unsolved: even the strongest agents achieve below 40% average test pass rates and rarely complete an entire repository correctly. Detailed analysis uncovers fundamental long-horizon failure modes, including premature termination, loss of global coherence, fragile cross-file dependencies, and inadequate planning over hundreds of interaction steps. NL2Repo Bench establishes a rigorous, verifiable testbed for measuring sustained agentic competence and highlights long-horizon reasoning as a central bottleneck for the next generation of autonomous coding agents.