AI STRUGGLES WITH CODE RECREATION IN NEW BENCHMARK TEST

The MirrorCode benchmark measures whether AI systems can reverse-engineer complete programs by analyzing their functionality alone. Claude Opus 4.7 led the field by successfully rebuilding a 16,000-line toolkit in 14 hours. However, the benchmark's most challenging tasks pushed AI to its limits. One task required continuous processing for 19 days and cost $2,600 to run—demonstrating both the computational expense and the fundamental difficulty of complex code recreation. The results highlight a clear gap in AI capabilities: while models excel at building code from scratch or making modifications to existing programs, they struggle significantly when tasked with complete reverse-engineering of software. The benchmark underscores that current AI systems, despite recent advances, remain limited in understanding and reproducing intricate program structures without direct access to source code. Epoch AI's findings suggest developers should approach AI-assisted code recreation with realistic expectations for now.