AI coding agents still need human cleanup on nearly three out of four tasks in a real-world test

Jonathan Kemper View the LinkedIn Profile of Jonathan Kemper Nov 8, 2026 ChatGPT-5.6 prompted by THE DECODER Researchers from Alibaba and several Asian universities built a coding-agent benchmark from real user change requests. Even the best model fully completes only about one in four tasks, putting the near-perfect scores of older tests into perspective. The team developed Co-Design Bench, a new test for coding agents. The agents must rework existing web apps based on user requests, sometimes using images, audio recordings, videos, or documents as input. According to the paper, GPT-6 Astra, the best of the ten models tested, meets about 70 percent of a task’s…