CodeClash Benchmarks LLMs through Multi-Round Coding Competitions

"Evaluating coding LLMs on well-specified tasks, such as fixing a bug, implementing an algorithm, or writing a test, is not sufficient to evaluate their ability to solve real-world software development challenges, the researchers argue. Instead of maintenance tasks, developers are driven by high-level goals like improving user retention, increasing revenue, or reducing costs. This requires fundamentally different capabilities; engineers must recursively decompose these objectives into actionable steps, prioritize them, and make strategic decisions about which solutions to pursue."

"To bring the LLM evaluation process closer to real-world, goal-oriented software engineering, the researchers developed CodeClash, a benchmark designed to mirror the iterative nature of the development cycle, where changes are proposed, deployed, and refined based on real-world feedback before moving to the next step in the process. In CodeClash, LLMs compete to build the best codebase capable of achieving a high-level objective:"

Evaluating coding LLMs on well-specified tasks such as fixing a bug or implementing an algorithm is insufficient to measure ability to solve real-world software development challenges. Developers pursue high-level goals like improving user retention, increasing revenue, or reducing costs, which require decomposing objectives, prioritizing tasks, and making strategic decisions. CodeClash mirrors iterative development by staging multi-round tournaments where multiple LLMs edit codebases and then compete in code arenas. Each round consists of an edit phase for code changes and a competition phase where codebases face off in arenas like BattleSnake, Poker, and RoboCode to determine winners by objective metrics.

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