adinagoerres
Joined 3 years ago
Joined 3 years ago
API execution is great for benchmarking, because it tests core qualities and limitations of LLMs:_the depth of the data they were trained on, their stateless architecture, context dependency, and reasoning.
Today we're releasing v2 of API-Bench:_a benchmark that tests how well LLMs can execute against APIs. Here are the results: https://superglue.ai/benchmark_v2
Tl;dr:_LLMs fail at integrations because they lack ground truth, lack state, lack debugging ability, and lack access to real system context - everything API integrations fundamentally require.
Here’s what we found:
1. LLMs are only as good as the data they’re trained on:_when docs change, APIs evolve, or systems are niche/long-tail, they use outdated patterns, guess missing pieces and hallucinate endpoints and parameters.
2. LLMs are stateless, but integrations are stateful:_auth handshakes, pagination, retries, multi-step flows all need memory but LLMs can’t persist intermediate values or reason across steps.
3. LLMs produce code that “looks right” but fails at runtime: LLMs cannot isolate the failing step and understand real error messages, so they can’t change what’s broken or retry with new hypotheses.
4. LLMs can’t reliably interpret imperfect API design:_humans can infer the intended function, LLMs will hallucinate what looks reasonable.
We open sourced the benchmark so you can test your own APIs or contribute new ones: https://github.com/superglue-ai/superglue/tree/main/eval/llm...
Curious to hear your experience, and of course always happy to share more learnings.
tl;dr: LLMs suck at writing code to use APIs.
We ran 630 integration tests across 21 common APIs (Stripe, Slack, GitHub, etc.) using 6 different LLMs. Here are our key findings: - Best general LLM: 68% success rate. That's 1 in 3 API calls failing. Would you ship that? - Our integration layer scored a 91% success rate, showing us that just throwing bigger/better LLMs at the problem won't solve it. - Only 6 out of 21 APIs worked 100% of the time, every other API had failures. - Anthropic’s models are significantly better at building API integrations than other providers.
What makes LLMs fail hard: - Lack of context (LLMs are just not great at understanding what API endpoints exist and what they do, even if you give them documentation which we did) - Multi-step workflows (chaining API calls) - Complex API design: APIs like Square, PostHog, Asana (Forcing project selection among other things trips llms over)
We've open-sourced the benchmark so you can test any API and see where it ranks: https://github.com/superglue-ai/superglue/tree/main/packages...
Check out the repo, consider giving it a star, or see the full ranking at https://superglue.ai/api-ranking/
If you're building agents that need reliable API access, we'd love to hear your approach - or you can try our integration layer at superglue.ai.
Next up: benchmarking MCP.