Evaluating LLM-Based 0-to-1 Software Generation in End-to-End CLI Tool Scenarios

Abstract:The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift towards intent-driven software development, where autonomous agents are expected to design and deliver complete, runnable software systems from scratch. However, existing benchmarks fail to adequately assess this 0-to-1 generation capability due to two fundamental limitations. First, they rely on predefined structural scaffolds, which reduces the task to mere file-filling. Second, they depend on rigid white-box unit testing, which forces generated code to conform to specific internal implementations rather than validating end-to-end user-centric behavior. To bridge this gap, we introduce CLI-Tool-Bench, a novel, structure-agnostic benchmark designed to evaluate the ground-up generation of Command-Line Interface (CLI) tools. Powered by an automated black-box differential testing framework, the benchmark comprises 94 high-quality, real-world repositories spanning diverse programming languages and complexity levels. For each task, agents are provided with an empty workspace, forcing them to autonomously handle repository planning and dependencies. We evaluate the generated software by executing it in isolated sandboxes. The system-level side effects and terminal outputs are then compared against human-written oracles using a rigorous multi-tiered equivalence metric. Extensive evaluation of seven state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that the top-tier models achieve a maximum overall success rate of only 43.8%, highlighting that 0-to-1 software generation remains a highly challenging frontier. Furthermore, we discover that agents exhibit a strong tendency to generate monolithic code structures, and that higher token consumption does not necessarily yield better task performance.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2604.06742 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2604.06742v2 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.06742 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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