FeatureArc: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Evolving Features

Abstract

A software feature usually evolves over time: developers extend its first version as new use cases and requirements arrive, and each extension builds on code written earlier. Most feature benchmarks evaluate a single request on a fixed codebase. Feature evolution requires evaluating successive extensions on an agent's own earlier code and checking whether the feature remains correct. We introduce FeatureArc to evaluate coding agents on evolving features, together with a pipeline that constructs its tasks from repository histories. The benchmark combines dependencies between successive stages of the same feature, explicit requirements and interface contracts, and executable checks across four programming languages. The pipeline validates fail-to-pass (F2P) tests for new behavior and pass-to-pass (P2P) tests for existing behavior on the reference code before and after each stage. We evaluated 10 coding agents on 73 manually reviewed tasks of 2 to 10 stages. Each agent works in one persistent session and workspace without external test feedback or rollback. The evaluation reveals a gap between first-stage and whole-feature success: pooled success falls from 62.7% at the first stage to 28.5% when the whole feature is tested on the final code. Trajectory analysis identifies inherited defects as a common failure mechanism, present in 72.9% of failed later stages. These earlier errors often remain undetected: in stages following a failure, agents leave the earlier error unnoticed about 95% of the time, and their self-tests rarely revisit earlier stages. Evolving a feature autonomously, without human checks between stages, therefore remains a substantial challenge for current coding agents. At Tencent, the pipeline extends internal evaluations to this setting and guides the development of Hunyuan, Tencent's family of large language models.