pxpipe/eval/swe-bench

SWE-bench Lite pilot — pxpipe ON vs OFF

Date: 2026-06-10. Model: claude-fable-5 via Claude Code CLI. n=10 paired instances. Question: does rendering old context as images (pxpipe) hurt end-to-end agentic task completion?

Result

	pxpipe ON	OFF
resolved (official swebench==4.1.0 Docker harness)	10/10	10/10
request size vs own uncompressed body	−65%	±0

The −65%: the proxy probes count_tokens on every original body before compressing — each request measured against its own counterfactual, no turn-count confound. Pilot window: 85,804,350 would-have-sent vs 29,942,152 sent (226 requests, 215 compressed, incl. a few stray probes). Grading reports: pxpipe-on.pxpipe_on.json, pxpipe-off.pxpipe_off.json.

Run totals — receipts only, don't divide across arms (independent agentic runs; OFF happened to take 2.4x the turns):

arm	resolved	API calls	input	cache_create	cache_read	output	$-equiv
pxpipe ON (port 47821)	10/10	138	40,997	1,101,573	8,608,940	89,611	$27.27
OFF (port 47822, compress=false)	10/10	337	144,342	1,383,705	19,087,170	315,674	$53.61

Honest caveats

1. The −49% total gap above mixes compression with turn-count variance — agentic runs are nondeterministic, and the OFF run took more turns. That is why the headline compression number is the per-request 65%, not the run totals. Per-call costs across arms are roughly equal, which is expected: different trajectories have different turn depths and cache patterns, so cross-arm per-call math is meaningless in both directions.
2. SWE-bench Lite skews easy; 10/10 both arms means this pilot measures parity, not superiority. A discriminating sample would need harder instances or more of them.
3. Dollar figures are token-equivalents computed from the proxy's own events.jsonl at Fable 5 list rates (input $10/M, cache-write 1.25x, cache-read 0.1x, output 5x input). Both arms ran through a proxy (ON compressing, OFF forced compress: false), so measurement overhead is identical.

Instances

django-14999, sympy-16503, matplotlib-23913, scikit-learn-13497, pytest-dev-5221, astropy-6938, sphinx-doc-7975, psf-requests-2674, pylint-dev-5859, pydata-xarray-3364 — picked to spread across repos, shorter problem statements preferred.

Reproduce

# 1. Two proxies: ON (47821) and OFF (47822, POST /api/compression {"enabled":false})
# 2. Generate patches (Claude Code CLI, MAX plan; ~$30-40 API-equivalent)
./venv/bin/python run_pilot.py          # writes preds_on.json / preds_off.json

# 3. Grade (Docker required; colima works: colima start --cpu 6 --memory 10)
export DOCKER_HOST="unix://$HOME/.colima/default/docker.sock"
./venv/bin/python -m swebench.harness.run_evaluation \
  --dataset_name princeton-nlp/SWE-bench_Lite --split test \
  --predictions_path preds_on.json --max_workers 3 --run_id pxpipe_on --cache_level env
# same for preds_off.json with --run_id pxpipe_off

# 4. Per-request compression (the 65%): each row in the proxy event log carries
#    baseline_tokens (count_tokens probe of the uncompressed body) next to what
#    was actually sent — sum both over the pilot window and compare.
python3 - <<'EOF'
import json, os
path = os.path.expanduser('~/.pxpipe/events.jsonl')
rows = [json.loads(l) for l in open(path)][15139:]   # offset from log_offsets_start.txt
sent = base = 0
for d in rows:
    if d.get('path') != '/v1/messages' or not d.get('baseline_tokens'): continue
    b = d['baseline_tokens']
    s = (d.get('input_tokens') or 0) + (d.get('cache_create_tokens') or 0) + (d.get('cache_read_tokens') or 0)
    base += b; sent += s
print(f'would-have-sent {base:,} vs sent {sent:,} -> {100*(1-sent/base):.0f}% smaller')
EOF