Can LLMs earn $1M from real freelance coding work?

A new benchmark tests AI’s ability to complete real-world software engineering tasks.

Welcome to the latest issue of Engineering Enablement, a weekly newsletter sharing research and perspectives on developer productivity.

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This week I read SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn $1 Million from Real-World Freelance Software Engineering?, a new paper from OpenAI that evaluates how well frontier AI models perform on real-world software development tasks.

My summary of the paper

In just two years, language models have advanced from solving basic textbook computer science problems to winning gold medals in international programming competitions—so it can be difficult for leaders to understand the current state of AI’s capabilities. In this paper, the researchers provide the first benchmark of this kind.

While previous coding benchmarks focused on isolated, self-contained tasks, this new benchmark (called SWE-Lancer) shows how AI models handle real-world tasks. In doing so, it also provides an understanding of AI’s capabilities today.

Creating the benchmark

To measure how well AI can handle real-world tasks, the researchers collected over 1,400 freelance jobs posted on Upwork. Each task had a real dollar value attached—ranging from $250 to $32,000—and collectively, the tasks were worth over $1 million. By tying performance to actual dollar values, this study provides a clearer picture of AI’s current economic impact potential.

The tasks were split into two types:

1. Individual contributor software engineering tasks — “Can AI fix this bug or build this feature?” These ranged from quick 15-minute fixes to multi-week feature requests. The AI model was given the issue description and access to the codebase, then had to write code to solve the problem. Human engineers built tests to check whether the AI’s solution actually worked.

2. Engineering manager tasks – “Can AI pick the best solution?” In these, the AI had to review multiple freelancer submissions for a job and choose the best one—just like a hiring manager would. The correct answer was based on what the original manager picked.

To be thorough, the researchers paid 100 professional software engineers to create and verify tests for every task. Each test was triple-verified.

They measured the success of each AI model using:

• Pass rate: How many tasks it completed successfully

• Earnings: The total dollar value of tasks it could complete

• Performance variations: How results changed when models had more tries, more time, or access to tools

This methodology provides a realistic picture of how well current AI models can handle the kinds of software engineering tasks that companies actually pay humans to do.

Performance and findings

The researchers evaluated three frontier models on the selected tasks:

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet

• OpenAI's GPT-4o

• OpenAI's "o1" with high reasoning effort

Here’s what they found:

1. All models underperform human engineers

As shown in the table below, all models earned well below the full $1 million USD of possible payout. Even the best-performing model—Claude 3.5 Sonnet—earned approximately $403,000 of the possible $1 million total, solving only 33.7% of all tasks.

2. All models perform better at management tasks than at coding

All models were significantly better at picking the best solutions than they were at creating the best solutions. For example, Claude 3.5 Sonnet successfully completed 47% of management tasks but only 21.1% of implementation tasks.

This suggests that AI might first aid engineering teams by helping with code reviews and architectural decisions before it can reliably write complex code.

3. Performance improves with multiple attempts

Allowing the o1 model 7 attempts instead of 1 nearly tripled its success rate, going from 16.5% to 46.5%. This hints that current models may have the knowledge to solve many more problems but struggle with execution on the first try.

4. More computation time helps, especially on harder problems

Increasing "reasoning effort" improved o1's performance from 9.3% to 16.5%, with even bigger gains on complex tasks. This indicates that current limitations might be computational rather than fundamental.

5. Models show significant differences in capabilities

Claude 3.5 Sonnet (31.7%) drastically outperformed GPT-4o (2.4%) on UI/UX tasks, suggesting important differences in how these models handle visual and interface elements.

Final thoughts

While today's best AI models can successfully complete some real-world tasks, they still cannot reliably handle the majority of complex projects. This study demonstrates both the incredible progress AI has made and the significant challenges that remain before teams can fully automate coding tasks.

Most importantly, the benchmark introduced in this paper provides a concrete way to measure AI progress going forward, helping leaders better understand and forecast AI's current ability and impact.

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Who’s hiring right now

This week’s featured DevProd & Platform job openings. See more open roles here.

• Adyen is hiring a Team Lead - Platform | Amsterdam

• Scribd is hiring a Senior Manager - Developer Tooling | Remote (US, Canada)

• Rippling is hiring a Director of Product Management - Platform | San Francisco

• UKG is hiring a Director and Sr Director of Technical Program Management | Multiple locations

• Snowflake is hiring a Director of Engineering - Test Framework | Bellevue and Menlo Park

• Lyft is hiring an Engineering Manager - DevEx | Toronto

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