FDE-Gym: The Last Mile of AI Delivery

Dongxu Yang, Hongda Yan, Renxin Wang, Baoli Zhang, Haojia Zuo +21

Existing agent benchmarks typically evaluate agents on well-specified tasks defined by issue reports, specifications, or task tickets. Real-world customer delivery is different: forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) must clarify ambiguous requirements, work in live systems, and uncover unstated constraints. We introduce FDE-Gym, a benchmark of 95 end-to-end delivery tasks from 20 customer scenarios across 18 sectors, each adapted by industry experts from real-world delivery projects. In simulated customer environments with scripted stakeholders and modifiable customer systems, agents interact with stakeholders and operate on production-like systems to deliver working solutions. FDE-Gym scores a delivery by how much it improves the customer's own success metric, normalized between 0 (unchanged system) and 1 (reference solution), with penalties for stakeholder interactions (messages, trial runs, and waiting time). An online platform lets humans practice FDE skills under the same grading criteria. We evaluate 13 model configurations from seven providers. In the realistic setting, where unstated constraints must be discovered, the best configuration achieves a mean FDE-Gym score of 0.56…