Glossary · Term

Terminal-Bench

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Definition

Plain language

A benchmark of hard command-line tasks for agentic systems.

As stated in the literature

A command-line task benchmark for AI agents covering operations like file recovery, system administration, and shell-driven problem solving.

Also called: Terminal-Bench v-two

Why it matters: It tests whether agents can really operate a computer the way a sysadmin does, not just write code in a sandbox.

For example, an agent might be dropped into a broken Linux system and asked to recover deleted files using only shell commands.

Heard on the show

“So every result on the other benchmark, Terminal-Bench, which is hard command-line tasks, is an out-of-domain test.”
Episode 142 — Training a Tiny Model to Run the Plumbing Between an Agent and the World

Mentioned in 8 episodes

  1. 142
    Training a Tiny Model to Run the Plumbing Between an Agent and the World
  2. 131
    Why Autonomous Research Agents Forget Their Own Lessons, and Arbor's Fix
  3. 125
    AI Coding Agents Run a Marathon, and Fewer Than One in Three Finish
  4. 124
    A Cheap Model With the Blueprints Beats Expensive Models Working Blind
  5. 121
    When the Agent Says It's Done But Nothing Happened: Debugging the Harness, Not the Model
  6. 120
    How an AI Agent Rewrites Its Own Tools, Without an Answer Key
  7. 046
    When the AI Optimizer Edits the Grade Book: Why Harnessing Evolution Needs a Wall
  8. 003
    How to Pick the Best of Sixteen Coding Agent Rollouts

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