Watkins: OpenAI hired nearly 100 engineers to curate 500 SWE-bench tasks
Olivia Watkins · The End of SWE-Bench Verified — Mia Glaese & Olivia Watkins, OpenAI Frontier Evals · Feb 23, 2026 · at 2:56
Olivia Watkins of OpenAI's Frontier Evals team explains the human verification process behind creating the SWE-bench Verified benchmark from Princeton's original SWE-bench dataset.
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“So folks at OpenAI did a pretty extensive human data campaign, hiring like almost a hundred real-world software engineers to go through the problems and figure out, like, are the tasks well-specified? Are the tests actually fair and kind of created a curated set of like 500 tasks that we thought were much better?”
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