BackendForge: Benchmarking Agentic End-to-End Code Generation with Backend Services
Authors: Yuzhe Guo, Mengzhou Wu, Yuan Cao, Jialei Wei, Dezhi Ran, Wei Yang, Tao Xie
Organizations: 1Key Lab of HCST (PKU), MOE; SCS, Peking University · 2Beijing Tongming Lake Information Technology Application Innovation Center (TLAIC) · 3Fudan University Institute of Systems for Advanced Computing · 4Shanghai Institute of Systems for Open Computing
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in agentic coding settings, where they can inspect files, execute commands, run tests, observe failures, and iteratively revise code. This shift raises a central evaluation question: can an agentic LLM generate an end-to-end software artifact that is both deployable and behaviorally correct under execution? Backend services provide a controlled but realistic substrate for this evaluation. Their APIs expose application-level executable semantics, and deployed behavior can be checked deterministically against an OpenAPI contract through black-box HTTP interactions. We introduce BackendForge, a benchmark of 56 contract-defined backend generation tasks rewritten from real open-source applications. Given a visible specification and an OpenAPI contract, an LLM must generate a Dockerized service that is built, deployed, and evaluated only through HTTP tests. To strengthen evaluation without introducing hidden requirements, BackendForge uses a test agent and a code agent to co-evolve the test oracle and reference service, where the test agent proposes specification-grounded backend tests and the code agent repairs the reference implementation. Although the best-performing model, GPT-5.5, succeeds on 55.4% of tasks under the base oracle, it succeeds on only 28.6% under the final oracle. This gap suggests that current LLMs can implement many local API behaviors, but still struggle to produce complete backend services.
Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate strong performance in autonomous code generation under loose specifications. However, production-grade software requires strict adherence to structural constraints, such as architectural patterns, databases, and object-relational mappings. Existing benchmarks often overlook these non-functional requirements, rewarding functionally correct but structurally arbitrary solutions. We present a systematic study evaluating how well agents handle structural constraints in multi-file backend generation. By fixing a unified API contract across 80 greenfield generation tasks and 20 feature-implementation tasks spanning eight web frameworks, we isolate the effect of structural complexity using a dual evaluation with end-to-end behavioral tests and static verifiers. Our findings reveal a phenomenon of constraint decay: as structural requirements accumulate, agent performance exhibits a substantial decline. Capable configurations lose 30 points on average in assertion pass rates from baseline to fully specified tasks, while some weaker configurations approach zero. Framework sensitivity analysis exposes significant performance disparities: agents succeed in minimal, explicit frameworks (e.g., Flask) but perform substantially worse on average in convention-heavy environments (e.g., FastAPI, Django). Finally, error analysis identifies data-layer defects (e.g., incorrect query composition and ORM runtime violations) as the leading root causes. This work highlights that jointly satisfying functional and structural requirements remains a key open challenge for coding agents.
Turning ideas into full software projects from scratch has become a popular use case for language models. Agents are being deployed to seed, maintain, and grow codebases over extended periods with minimal human oversight. Such settings require models to make high-level software architecture decisions. However, existing benchmarks measure focused, limited tasks such as fixing a single bug or developing a single, specified feature. We therefore introduce ProgramBench to measure the ability of software engineering agents to develop software holisitically. In ProgramBench, given only a program and its documentation, agents must architect and implement a codebase that matches the reference executable's behavior. End-to-end behavioral tests are generated via agent-driven fuzzing, enabling evaluation without prescribing implementation structure. Our 200 tasks range from compact CLI tools to widely used software such as FFmpeg, SQLite, and the PHP interpreter. We evaluate 9 LMs and find that none fully resolve any task, with the best model passing 95% of tests on only 3% of tasks. Models favor monolithic, single-file implementations that diverge sharply from human-written code.
Existing code-generation benchmarks score a single mapping from a complete prompt to a one-shot output. However, real web development is different. Users seldom write a full spec at the start; many requirements only become clear once they look at an intermediate result and react to it. We present Asuka-Bench, a benchmark that pairs underspecified user intent with multi-round refinement, grounded in browser-rendered behavior. Each task is resolved through a closed loop: a Code Agent generates a web project, a UI Agent executes test cases on the deployed site, and a User LLM turns evaluation outcomes into natural-language feedback for the next round. The benchmark comprises 50 web tasks with 784 evaluation criteria and 2402 expected outcomes. We benchmark 8 LLMs across 2 agent frameworks. The results separate models clearly: weighted Task Pass Rate varies by 38 percentage points and models also differ substantially in their ability to repair from feedback. Asuka-Bench is also far from saturated: even the strongest model completes only 52% of projects after three rounds.