# ProgramBench

Teams of coding agents generally beat a single agent at rebuilding programs, but at four to seven times the cost. A controlled study across 200 ProgramBench programs finds that putting cheaper models only on exploration and planning comes within 2.7 points of an all-strong-model team that delegates every stage, at roughly a fifth of that team's cost, because discovering the original program's behavior is the real bottleneck.

Teams of coding agents generally beat a single agent at rebuilding programs, but at four to seven times the cost. A controlled study across 200 ProgramBench programs finds that putting cheaper models only on exploration and planning comes within 2.7 points of an all-strong-model team that delegates every stage, at roughly a fifth of that team's cost, because discovering the original program's behavior is the real bottleneck.