Take It From Here: Evaluating Coding Agents On Project Takeover

Dingxian Wang, Zhe Fu, Jiaqi Deng, Chao Yin, Ganesh Prabhu +7

Coding agents increasingly collaborate on long-term projects. When taking over a project, they need to recover currently applicable requirements from the interaction history and update them in response to new requests. However, most coding benchmarks do not include long interaction histories, and some evaluations that consider history still do not cover the full process from requirement reconstruction to project delivery. We therefore provide agents with the interaction history, current request, and pre-request project environment, ask them to make the requested changes, and assess takeover performance through delivery tests. Across six model-harness configurations and 37 targets eligible for executable validation, the mean complete-delivery rate under Full History is only 4.95%. We then use requirement atoms to independently diagnose a larger set of takeover targets, examining relevant information identification, pre-request state reconstruction, and current request processing. We further supply correct pre-request or target states to examine the remaining difficulties in requirement processing and project modification. The diagnostics show that none of the six configurations…