TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents

Shoufa Chen, Luyuan Wang, Xuan Yang, Zhiheng Liu, Yuren Cong, Yuanfeng Ji, Feiyan Zhou, Xiaohui Zhang, Fanny Yang, Belinda Zeng

As large language models and harness frameworks continue to advance, agents operating in terminals are increasingly capable of performing a broader range of general computer-use tasks beyond coding. However, existing benchmarks do not adequately evaluate general-purpose terminal computer-use agents (TUAs): general computer-use benchmarks primarily target graphical user interfaces (GUIs), whereas terminal-based benchmarks largely emphasize technical and programming-centric workflows historically native to the shell. We introduce TUA-Bench, a general-purpose benchmark for terminal-use agents. TUA-Bench includes 120 real-world tasks across five task families, covering routine digital activities-including document editing, email management, and live-web information seeking-as well as scientific and engineering workflows co-designed with PhD-level domain experts that require specialized software. This breadth distinguishes TUA-Bench from prior shell-focused or domain-specific benchmarks. Each task is manually designed, runs in a real terminal with a deterministic setup script, and is evaluated by an execution-based scoring protocol. We find that the strongest frontier agent, Claude Code with Claude Opus 4.8 max reasoning effort, achieves 65.8% overall performance, with substantial gaps across both tracks. By providing a broad and realistic evaluation of terminal-use capabilities, TUA-Bench aims to accelerate the transition from narrow, task-specific assistants to general-purpose agents capable of operating reliably across diverse digital environments.