# ProgramBench: Can Language Models Rebuild Programs from Scratch?

> Source: <https://github.com/facebookresearch/programbench>
> Published: 2026-10-30 20:48:40+00:00

*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](https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/) for managing Python environments.

```
# Run without installing
uvx programbench --help

# Or install into a project
uv pip install programbench

# Or with pip
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](https://github.com/facebookresearch/ProgramBench/blob/main/docs/README.md).

To run our baseline:

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

See the [mini-swe-agent baseline docs](https://mini-swe-agent.com/latest/usage/programbench/) 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](https://github.com/facebookresearch/ProgramBench/blob/main/LICENSE).