CodeMidas: Scaling Agentic Coding RL Environments from Code Itself
Bowen Ye, Lei Li, Shicheng Li, Zihao Yue, Linghao Zhang, Hanglong Lv, et al.
arXiv:2609.22068v1Today’s standout paper is CodeMidas, which tackles a big bottleneck in training coding agents: they need lots of diverse tasks, but reliable tasks with automatic checks are hard to find. Instead of depending on issue trackers or commit histories, CodeMidas mines open-source code itself. It uses an agentic pipeline to inspect implemented functionality, infer what the code is supposed to do, build executable tests from that behavior, and filter out weak or ambiguous tasks by running repeated solution attempts. The result is a large dataset of more than 5,500 training tasks across thousands of codebases and many programming languages. Why does this matter? Because it turns the world’s existing software into a scalable training ground for coding agents. When used to train a model with reinforcement learning, the approach improves performance on issue repair, whole-program construction, and terminal-based tasks. More broadly, it shows that source code alone can provide the raw material for better, more general software agents.
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