Can the agent distinguish stdout and stderr?

[Kazuki1450]

Hi!

I find that some test functions failed against a generated executable because the test expected to have some string in stderr, while the executable gave that string in stdout.

I also noticed that ProgramBench’s container execution helper appears to merge stdout/stderr streams here.

Is stdout/stderr separation intentionally unavailable to agents during exploration? (I think it is still possible for an agent to manually test stream placement with shell redirection, e.g. cmd >/tmp/out 2>/tmp/err, but the default observation format seems to make the distinction easy to miss.)

Thank you!

The commands I ran

uv run --with mini-swe-agent mini-extra programbench \
    --filter "abishekvashok__cmatrix.5c082c6" \
    --output output \
    --model openai/gpt-5.4

uv run programbench eval output

Score log

                 Evaluation Summary                   
 Instance                        Score  Comment     
 abishekvashok__cmatrix.5c082c6     94  507 tests   
 Average                            94  1 instances 

A failed test in eval.json

• task: abishekvashok/cmatrix
• test function name: eval.tests.test_cmatrix.TestColorOptions.test_color_invalid_shows_error_message
• branch: 1b991a57d4e9

self = <test_cmatrix.TestColorOptions object at 0x7732071f2bf0>

    def test_color_invalid_shows_error_message(self):
        """Test invalid color name produces error message."""
        result = run("-C", "purple")
        assert result.returncode == 0  # Exits with 0 but shows error
>       assert b"Invalid color" in result.stderr
E       AssertionError: assert b'Invalid color' in b''
E        +  where b'' = CompletedProcess(args=['./executable', '-C', 'purple'], returncode=0, stdout=b' Invalid color selection\n Valid colors are green, red, blue, white, yellow, cyan, magenta and black.\n', stderr=b'').stderr

eval/tests/test_cmatrix.py:120: AssertionError

[klieret]

Thanks for bringing this up, I will have to think about this.

mini-swe-agent's programbench runner also merges stdout and stderr

The problem is that if you don't do that and capture them separately, you lose ordering between them (in some programs stdout and stderr might be interleaved), which is where that design came from.

However, I agree that these tests might be considered unfair given that consideration.

I'll have to think about how to best resolve this.

[Kazuki1450]

Thanks for the reply!

I now understand that this is not necessarily something that can be resolved simply by preparing separate fields for stdout and stderr.

Perhaps this could be mentioned in the prompt so that the agent is aware of this, then? In any case, I’ll leave the final decision to you. Thank you for considering this!