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SWELancer-Benchmark
Science & Engineering2025–2025
openai / SWELancer-Benchmark · Archived

SWELancer-Benchmark

This repo contains the dataset and code for the paper "SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn $1 Million from Real-World Freelance Software Engineering?"

4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

This repo contains the dataset and code for the paper "SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn $1 Million from Real-World Freelance Software Engineering?"

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by day5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2025-02-19 06:38:29 UTC to 2025-02-27 20:18:51 UTC.

01232025-02-19 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-20 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 commentsFeb 192025-02-20 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-21 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-02-21 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-22 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-02-22 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-23 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-02-23 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-24 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsFeb 232025-02-24 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-25 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-02-25 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-26 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-02-26 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-27 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-02-27 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-28 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsFeb 27

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Feb 192025-02-19 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-20 00:00:00 UTC303
Feb 202025-02-20 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-21 00:00:00 UTC101
Feb 212025-02-21 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-22 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 222025-02-22 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-23 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 232025-02-23 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-24 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 242025-02-24 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-25 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 252025-02-25 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-26 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 262025-02-26 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-27 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 272025-02-27 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-28 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
Considering both this blog post and the livestream demos, I am underwhelmed. Having just finished the stream, I had a real "was that all" moment, which on one hand shows how spoiled I've gotten by new models impressing me, but on another feels like OpenAI really struggles to stay ahead of their competitors. What has been shown feels like it could be achieved using a custom system prompt on older versions of OpenAIs models, and I struggle to see anything here that truly required ground-up training on such a massive scale. Hearing that they were forced to spread their training across multiple data centers simultaneously, coupled with their recent release of SWE-Lancer [0] which showed Anthropic (Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new) to be exact) handily beating them, I was really expecting something more than "slightly more casual/shorter output", which
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again, I fail to see how that wasn't possible by prompting GPT-4o. Looking at pricing [1], I am frankly astonished. > Input: $75.00 / 1M tokens > Cached input: $37.50 / 1M tokens > Output: $150.00 / 1M tokens How could they justify that asking price? And, if they have some amazing capabilities that make a 30-fold pricing increase justifiable, why not show it? Like, OpenAI are many things, but I always felt they understood price vs performance incredibly well, from the start with gpt-3.5-turbo up to now with o3-mini, so this really baffles me. If GPT-4.5 can justify such immense cost in certain tasks, why hide that and if not, why release this at all? [0] https://github.com/openai/SWELancer-Benchmark [1] https://openai.com/api/pricing/
In GPT-4.5
So it's much worse than I assumed from paper and repo overview? For further clarification: 1. See the issue example #14268 https://github.com/openai/SWELancer-Benchmark/tree/08b5d3dff.... It has a patch that is supposed to "reintroduce" the bug into the codebase (note the comments): + // Intentionally use raw character count instead of HTML-converted length + const validateCommentLength = (text: string) => { + // This will only check raw character count, not HTML-converted length + return text.length <= CONST.MAX_COMMENT_LENGTH; + }; Also, the patch is supposedly applied over commit da2e6688c3f16e8db76d2bcf4b098be5990e8968 - much later than original fix, but also a year ago, not sure why, might be something to do with cut off dates. 2. Proceed to https://github.com/Expensify/App/issues/14268 to see the ac
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tual original issue thread. 3. Here is the actual merged solution at the time: https://github.com/Expensify/App/pull/15501/files#diff-63222... - as you can see the diff is quite different... Not only that, but the point to which the "bug" was reapplied is so far to the future that repo migrated to typescript even. --- And they still had to add a whole another level of bullshit with "management" tasks on top of that, guess why =) Prior "bench" analysis for reference: https://arxiv.org/html/2410.06992v1 (edit: code formatting)
In SWE-Lancer: a benchmark of freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork
It was just two examples of widespread problems with the introduced bugs and the tests. How about this - https://github.com/openai/SWELancer-Benchmark/blob/08b5d3dff... (Intentionally use raw character count instead of HTML-converted length) Or this one - https://github.com/openai/SWELancer-Benchmark/blob/08b5d3dff... (user is complaining of flickering, so the reintroduced bug adds flickering code :) ) Or the one that they list in A.10 of the paper as O1 successfuly fixing - https://github.com/openai/SWELancer-Benchmark/blob/main/issu... O1 doesnt actually seem to fix anything (besides arbitrary dumping all over the code), the reintroduced bug is messing with the state, not with the back button navigation. Anyways, I went thru a sample of 20-30 last night and gave up. Noone needs to take my words - force pushing aside, anyone can pull the
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repo and check for themselves. Most of the 'bugs' are trivialized to a massive degree, which a) makes them very easy to solve for b) doesnt reflect their previous monetary value, which in effect makes the whole premise of 'let measure how SWE agents can provide real money value' invalid. If they wanted to create a real one, they should've found the commits reflecting the state of the app as of the moment of the bug and setup up the benchmarks around that.
In SWE-Lancer: a benchmark of freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork
First time commenter - I was so triggered by this benchmark, so I just had to come out of lurking. I've spent time going over the description and the cases and its an misrepresented travesty. The benchmark takes existing cases from Upwork, then reintroduces the problems back in the code and then asks the LLM to fix them testing against newly written 'comprehensive tests'. Lets look at some of the cases: 1. The regex zip code validation problem Looking at the Upwork problem - https://github.com/Expensify/App/issues/14958 it was mainly that they were using a common regex to validate across all countries, so the solution had to introduce country specific regex etc. The "reintroduced bug" - https://github.com/openai/SWELancer-Benchmark/blob/main/issu... is just taking that new code and adding , to two countries.... 2. Room showing empty - 148
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57 The "reintroduced bug" - https://github.com/openai/SWELancer-Benchmark/blob/main/issu... Adds code explicitly commented as introducing a "radical bug" and "intentionally returning an empty array"... I could go on and on and on... The "extensive tests" are also laughable :( I am not sure if OpenAI is actually aware of how great this "benchmark" is, but after so much fanfare - they should be.
In SWE-Lancer: a benchmark of freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork

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