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arxiv:2605.22535

TerminalWorld: Benchmarking Agents on Real-World Terminal Tasks

Published on May 21
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on May 22
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Abstract

We introduce TerminalWorld, a scalable data engine that automatically reverse-engineers high-fidelity evaluation tasks from "in-the-wild" terminal recordings. Processing 80,870 terminal recordings, the engine yields a full benchmark of 1,530 validated tasks, spanning 18 real-world categories, ranging from short everyday operations to workflows exceeding 50 steps, and covering 1,280 unique commands. From these, we curate a Verified subset of 200 representative, manually reviewed tasks. Comprehensive benchmarking on TerminalWorld-Verified across eight frontier models and six agents reveals that current systems still struggle with authentic terminal workflows, achieving a maximum pass rate of only 62.5%. Moreover, TerminalWorld captures real-world terminal capabilities distinct from existing expert-curated benchmarks (e.g., Terminal-Bench), with only a weak correlation to their scores (Pearson r=0.20). The automated engine makes TerminalWorld authentic and scalable by construction, enabling it to evaluate agents in real-world terminal environments as developer practices evolve. Data and code are available at https://github.com/EuniAI/TerminalWorld.

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Paper submitter

TerminalWorld is a scalable data engine that reverse-engineers real-world terminal recordings into a benchmark of 1,530 validated tasks to evaluate agent performance on authentic software engineering terminal workflows.

Paper author

Thanks for sharing our paper! ๐Ÿ™

We built TerminalWorld to ask a practical question: Can terminal agents handle real-world human workflows?

Terminal-Bench is an important benchmark for terminal agents, while TerminalWorld takes a complementary path:
โœ๏ธ Manually authored tasks โ†’ Terminal-Bench
๐Ÿ”ด Real human terminal recordings โ†’ TerminalWorld

๐Ÿ“Š From 80,870 public human terminal recordings, we reverse-engineer 1,530 validated terminal tasks, including a 200-task manually verified subset.

๐Ÿงฐ Each task includes a natural language instruction, human reference solution, Docker environment, and test suits.

๐ŸŒ TerminalWorld covers 18 real-world terminal categories and 1,280 unique tools/commands, including containers, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, system administration, environment setup, and software build/testing.

๐Ÿงช We evaluate frontier LLMs and terminal agents. Even the best model reaches only 62.5% pass rate, showing that authentic terminal workflows remain challenging.

Feedback is very welcome! ๐Ÿš€

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22535
Code: https://github.com/EuniAI/TerminalWorld
Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/EuniAI/TerminalWorld

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