What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

Epoch AI · 2 months ago · 33

Researchers introduced MirrorCode, a benchmark that tests AI models on reimplementing entire software programs end-to-end without access to original source code. Claude Opus 4.7 successfully reimplemented gotree, a 16,000-line bioinformatics toolkit in Go, in 14 hours at a cost of $251, a task that would take a human engineer 2–17 weeks. The benchmark's open-source release and leaderboard enable systematic measurement of AI capabilities on long-horizon coding tasks that require weeks of inference budget rather than dollars.