What Makes a Good Terminal-Agent Benchmark Task: A Guideline for Adversarial, Difficult, and Legible Evaluation Design
Terminal-agent benchmarks have become a primary signal for measuring the coding and system-administration capabilities of large language models. As the market for evaluation environments grows, so does the pressure to ship tasks quickly, often without thorough adversarial review of the verification logic. This paper is a guideline for writing good benchmark tasks, drawn from over a year of contributing to and reviewing tasks for Terminal Bench. Most people write benchmark tasks the way they write prompts. They shouldn't. A prompt is designed to help the agent succeed; a benchmark is designed to find out if it can. We argue that good tasks are adversarial, difficult, and legible, and that ...
| Authors | Ivan Bercovich |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 30 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 April 2026 |
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