gem5's build system was migrated from SCons to CMake in full: 567 files changed, by one engineer and a set of agents running for weeks.

This is the oldest result on this page and, for what we were trying to learn, one of the most useful — because a build-system migration is the least glamorous long-horizon task there is, and it has almost none of the properties that make a benchmark flattering.

There is no clever insight to have. There is no moment where a good idea collapses the search. There is a very large number of mechanical changes, each of which is easy, and a build that either works or does not, and a long stretch in the middle where it does not work for a reason that has nothing to do with the change you just made.

Work of that shape is exactly where a session that starts fresh every turn falls apart, where a run that keeps everything in context drowns, and where an agent left unsupervised will eventually declare victory on a build that compiles a subset. It is the reason we started caring about the loop rather than the model, and it is the kind of task FlowBench is being assembled out of.

One engineer, some weeks, 567 files, and a build that works.