How to benchmark coding orchestrators on your own repository
Toy greenfield demos reward speed over correctness. Use this reproducible protocol, weighted scorecard, and frozen task specification to test orchestrators against real post-mortem bugs in your codebase.
Interactive weighted architecture scorecard
Adjust the priority sliders (0 to 5) to reflect your organization's engineering risk profile, repository complexity, model vendor strategy, and data-residency requirements.
The three-commit historical bake-off protocol
Instead of inventing synthetic prompts during a vendor trial, select three merged production commits from the past six months that required multiple human review rounds:
- A concurrency, retry, or state-boundary bug where existing unit tests originally passed before the incident occurred.
- A cross-module refactor touching at least four files with strict backward-compatibility invariants.
- A security or permission-boundary hardening change where subtle bypasses are easy to overlook.
Check out the parent commit prior to the human fix, provide the exact same frozen requirement specification below to each orchestrator, and blind-grade the resulting pull requests on: (a) unprompted edge-case coverage, (b) zero weakened existing tests, and (c) minutes of principal engineer review time required before merge confidence.
Copyable frozen task specification template
High-assurance orchestrators perform best when given explicit behavioral obligations and invariants rather than vague step-by-step hints. Use this specification structure across every tool in your evaluation:
# Engineering Task Specification
## 1. Objective
Describe the observable system behavior that must hold after this change, written from the caller's perspective rather than prescribing which lines to edit.
## 2. Behavioral Obligations
- Under concurrent retries or upstream timeouts, callers must never receive stale state or leak pending handles.
- Public API signatures and wire formats in existing routes must remain backward-compatible.
- Error propagation must preserve structured cause codes for telemetry.
## 3. Explicit Non-Goals
- Do not introduce new external runtime dependencies.
- Do not modify database schema migrations or relax existing test assertions.
## 4. Acceptance Criteria
- All existing unit and integration suites pass without weakened mocks.
- At least one deterministic regression test reproduces the failure mode on the baseline commit and passes with the fix.Enterprise security, model economics & data custody checklist
Before clearing any orchestrator for proprietary source repositories, verify four operational guarantees with security and architecture leadership:
- Zero training & zero data retention: Confirm whether prompts, indexes, or transient diff traces are retained in US multi-tenant logs. Askus Operator executes on zero-data-retention servers in Liechtenstein and Switzerland (LI / CH) with zero training on customer code.
- Bring-your-own model contracts: Verify that orchestration is not hardcoded to a single LLM vendor's pricing or outages, and can route across Copilot, Codex, frontier cloud APIs, or internal weights.
- Cost-efficient token economics: Ensure the orchestrator can extract frontier-grade engineering quality from fast, economical models rather than burning maximum-tier tokens on every step.
- Auditability: Require clear verification records so engineering leadership can audit why a change passed quality gates before merge.
To benchmark Askus Operator against a real commit from your repository, request an Operator deployment briefing or return to the 2026 Agent Orchestrator Benchmark.