ProgramBench: Can Language Models Rebuild Programs from Scratch?

Can Language Models Rebuild Programs From Scratch?

Given only a compiled binary and its documentation, AI agents must architect and implement a complete codebase that reproduces the original program's behavior.

We recommend uv for managing Python environments.

uvx programbench --help

uv pip install programbench

pip install programbench

For development:

git clone https://github.com/facebookresearch/programbench.git
cd programbench
uv sync  # installs editable + dev dependencies

Note

For more details, please refer to the Usage Guide.

To run our baseline:

uvx --from mini-swe-agent mini-extra programbench --help
pip install mini-swe-agent && mini-extra programbench --help

See the mini-swe-agent baseline docs for details.

If our work was useful for you, please cite it:

@misc{yang2026programbenchlanguagemodelsrebuild,
    title={ProgramBench: Can Language Models Rebuild Programs From Scratch?},
    author={John Yang and Kilian Lieret and Jeffrey Ma and Parth Thakkar and Dmitrii Pedchenko and Sten Sootla and Emily McMilin and Pengcheng Yin and Rui Hou and Gabriel Synnaeve and Diyi Yang and Ofir Press},
    year={2026},
    eprint={2605.03546},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.SE},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03546},
}

ProgramBench is licensed under the terms of the license found in LICENSE.