SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn $1 Million from Real-World Freelance
  Software Engineering?
Authors: name: Samuel Miserendino; name: Michele Wang; name: Tejal Patwardhan; name: Johannes Heidecke
Published: 2025-02-17 18:41:16

Abstract: We introduce SWE-Lancer, a benchmark of over 1,400 freelance software
engineering tasks from Upwork, valued at \1 million USD total in real-world
payouts. SWE-Lancer encompasses both independent engineering tasks--ranging
from 50 bug fixes to \$32,000 feature implementations--and managerial tasks,
where models choose between technical implementation proposals. Independent
tasks are graded with end-to-end tests triple-verified by experienced software
engineers, while managerial decisions are assessed against the choices of the
original hired engineering managers. We evaluate model performance and find
that frontier models are still unable to solve the majority of tasks. To
facilitate future research, we open-source a unified Docker image and a public
evaluation split, SWE-Lancer Diamond
(https://github.com/openai/SWELancer-Benchmark). By mapping model performance
to monetary value, we hope SWE-Lancer enables greater research into the
economic impact of AI model development.