Microsoft ThinkingBox grades AI agents on database state across 20 repeated runs
Microsoft and Hugging Face released ThinkingBox, a benchmark that grades AI agents on the terminal backend state and side effects they leave behind rather than their final responses. Each of 507 stateful business tasks runs 20 times from a clean backend, and the post reports pass@1, pass@20, and observed 20/20 counts, plus cost per successful and per dependable task across 18 models. The harness and dataset are available on Hugging Face, with the OpenEnv interface for running evaluations.
AIWhy it matters: The post shows why checking the database state, not tool calls or final replies, exposes agent failures, and gives a repeat-run method for judging reliability.