MirrorCode: AI can rebuild entire programs from behavior alone

[Submitted on 29 Jun 2026 (v1), last revised 17 Jul 2026 (this version, v2)]

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Abstract:AI models are rapidly improving at autonomous coding, as shown by benchmark progress and one-off demonstrations such as AI implementing a C compiler. However, existing coding benchmarks tend to focus on shorter tasks, and one-off demonstrations are hard to compare systematically because they often have some human guidance, and are not standardized or repeated across models. To address these challenges, we introduce MirrorCode, a long-horizon coding benchmark based on reimplementing entire software projects. In MirrorCode, AI agents must replicate the functionalities of an existing program, without access to its source code. AI solutions must match the original program’s output exactly on end-to-end tests, including held-out tests. MirrorCode’s 25 target programs span different areas of computing: Unix utilities, data serialization and query tools, bioinformatics, interpreters, static analysis, cryptography, and compression. Existing AI models can already reimplement complex software, with the strongest model scoring 56% across the benchmark. For example, AI can reimplement gotree, a 16,000-line bioinformatics toolkit – a task that we believe would take weeks for a human engineer. However, studying the frontier of performance requires a larger inference budget than typical benchmarks, for example, \$2,600 over 19 days for a single attempt on a large task. We show that AI agents can already complete long-horizon software engineering tasks, especially when requirements are precisely specified. More broadly, our work suggests AI will have transformative effects on software engineering, as autonomous agents continue to improve.

Submission history

From: Thomas Adamczewski [view email]
[v1] Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:57:32 UTC (243 KB)
[v2] Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:56:56 UTC (243 KB)