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Agents pass most individual checks, then fall apart when all of them have to pass

SkillForgeBench found rubric pass rates of 70–85.7%, but only 12.6–40.9% strict completion. The gap may be closer to how agents behave in real work.

Abdul Habeeb10 October 20262 min read Photo: Pexels

This post is written in English.

A benchmark score can hide a lot, depending on what counts as success. SkillForgeBench, a preprint submitted on 10 October, tests eight mainstream agents on 842 sandboxed tasks across five professional domains.

The headline gap

Individual rubric pass rates ranged from 70.0% to 85.7%. Requiring every constraint on a task to be satisfied dropped results to 12.6% to 40.9%. Opus 4.8 led with 40.9% strict completion.

If you've used agents on real work, that may feel familiar: they do most of what you asked, and miss one requirement.

Two more findings:

  • Process lags outcome. Agents met process rubrics far less often than completion rubrics, with Haiku 4.5 under 3%. The authors conclude that "completion-only checks overestimate real-world agent reliability."
  • Skills help the strong more. Skills improved Opus 4.8 by 19.2%, against 5.8% for Haiku 4.5.

Caveats

This is a preprint, so its rubrics and tasks haven't been through peer review, and it tests the models available at the time. Comparisons will date quickly. "Strict completion" is also a demanding bar, and not every job needs every rule followed.

My read

The process finding matters most to me. Getting the right answer the wrong way is often a real failure: skipping a required review, or editing a file it was told not to touch. If your evaluation only checks the final output, you won't see that. A simple improvement is to log the steps an agent took, and check a few of the rules you actually care about.

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