John Yang

Research

Yang completed an M.S.E. in computer science at Princeton University, advised by Karthik Narasimhan, and is now a PhD student at Stanford University advised by Ludwig Schmidt and Diyi Yang. Yang's research covers language model agents, language model evaluation, synthetic data and software engineering.¹

Yang co-authored SWE-bench (October 2023), which tests whether language models can resolve real GitHub issues, and was first author of SWE-agent (May 2024) and SWE-smith (April 2025). Yang's site also lists InterCode and CodeClash among the projects Yang created and features ProgramBench.⁴⁵⁶¹

SWE-sweep

Yang is the final author of SWE-sweep, released with Kilian Lieret as first author. The benchmark gives agents a real repository and asks them to find and fix as many bugs as possible, scoring hidden per-bug tests and assigning zero to a task if previously passing tests break.²³

Work and contributions

• SWE-sweep Open-source code

  Last-listed author of SWE-sweep, a benchmark in which agents must discover and repair bugs in real repositories without hints about bug type or location.²³

• SWE-bench Open data

  Co-author of "SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?" (2023); Yang's site lists Yang as the creator of SWE-bench and its Verified, Multimodal and Multilingual variants.⁴¹

• SWE-agent and SWE-smith Open-source code

  First author of SWE-agent (2024), on agent-computer interfaces for software engineering, and SWE-smith (2025), on scaling training data for software engineering agents.⁵⁶

Timeline

1. Oct 2023Co-authored SWE-bench, a benchmark of real-world GitHub issues for language models.⁴
2. May 2024Posted SWE-agent, on agent-computer interfaces for software engineering, as first author.⁵
3. Apr 2025Posted SWE-smith, on scaling data for software engineering agents, as first author.⁶
4. 2026Co-authored SWE-sweep, a bug discovery and repair benchmark released by Meta, as last author.³

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• M.S.E. in Computer Science, advised by Karthik Narasimhan, Princeton University¹

Where they work

• Stanford University 40 people in the wiki

Related people

• Michele CatastaAlso at Stanford University
• Yoav ShohamAlso at Stanford University
• Percy LiangAlso at Stanford University
• Chip HuyenAlso at Stanford University
• Trevor HastieAlso at Stanford University
• Andrew LaackDeveloper tools · Agents
• Kilian LieretAgents · Evaluation and benchmarks
• Manik SurtaniAgents · Developer tools
• Mike KnoopEvaluation and benchmarks · Agents
• Robert BrennanAgents · Developer tools