Choose benchmarks for coding, cybersecurity and computer use agents
Match your agent's job to a verifiable outcome, then build a small evaluation portfolio that covers its distinct failure modes.
These categories overlap, but their success conditions differ. Choose benchmarks from the artifact or state your agent must produce, then add separate tests for weak points such as tool use, GUI grounding or secure code.
Define the outcome before choosing a category
Start by describing what a user should receive when the agent succeeds. Is it a code change, a validated security finding, a completed browser transaction or an edited document? These outcomes suggest different verifiers. A patch can be tested in a repository; an application workflow can be checked through its final state. The presence of a language model and tools does not make those tests interchangeable.
Then identify the system boundary. Decide whether you are evaluating a base model, your agent framework or the complete application. Keep the same boundary when comparing candidates. Otherwise, improvements to prompts, recovery logic or environment setup can be mistaken for changes in the model itself. The following selection process is editorial guidance for building a useful portfolio, not a claim that one benchmark covers every deployment.
For coding agents
For a completion assistant, a function-level test can reveal whether generated code satisfies a compact specification. For an autonomous repository assistant, add tasks that require reading existing code and delivering a change that passes project tests. These test different parts of the workflow; use one to diagnose local code generation and another to assess integration.
Inspect what is included in a successful submission. A test suite may check the requested behavior and regressions, but it may not assess readable design, security or ease of future maintenance. If those properties matter to your users, add an explicit review or evaluation for them. Do not let an execution success metric become a blanket claim about engineering quality.
For security agents
A security evaluation should state the capability it measures. Cybench examines challenge solving. CyberGym asks for a vulnerability reproducer under its verification rules. ExploitBench concerns a specialized exploit setting. Secure code generation asks a different question again: whether generated software avoids specified weaknesses. A single “cyber” score cannot substitute for these distinctions.
Choose the task closest to the intended security workflow and read its starting information carefully. Provided source code, detailed vulnerability descriptions or intermediate hints change the problem. Compare runs with matching assistance and budgets. Also separate capability from policy behavior: refusing a harmful request does not demonstrate the ability to repair software, and completing a challenge does not measure appropriate refusal.
Cybench official project · CyberGym research paper · ExploitBench official project · CyberSecEval benchmark collection
For computer use agents
If the agent acts through a graphical interface, first check whether it can locate the element described by an instruction. Then evaluate complete tasks in the relevant environment. A system can click accurately yet fail to preserve document state, navigate between applications or recover from a mistaken action. A complete workflow result can also conceal a weak component that fails on a different layout.
Match the observation channel to your product. Screenshot-only interaction, accessibility information and structured browser content provide different evidence. Match action limits and application versions too. For desktop work, OSWorld provides an example of execution-based task evaluation; AndroidWorld addresses a mobile environment. Neither should be treated as a universal measure of every interface.
SeeClick and ScreenSpot · OSWorld and OSWorld Verified · AndroidWorld
Build a portfolio with a reason for every test
Use one evaluation close to the complete job, then add focused tests for the failures you need to diagnose. For example, a browser-based coding assistant may need repository work and interface interaction evaluated separately. A security coding assistant may need both functional and secure-code checks. Overlapping topic labels are useful here because one workflow can draw on several capabilities and a specialist domain.
For every selected benchmark, record the expected artifact, verifier, allowed information, resource limit and known blind spot. Review failures on representative examples from your application before widening access. If no public benchmark fits a crucial requirement, document that gap and create a targeted local test instead of stretching an unrelated leaderboard into evidence it does not provide.