Journeyman

A process-quality benchmark for agents.

Journeyman measures how agents work — and how they fail.

You point it at your agent (any OpenAI-compatible endpoint). It drops the agent into seven small simulated jobs — diagnose a crashed service, assay an alloy at a bench, walk a fogged maze, hand a shift to a stranger — and grades how it worked, not just whether it finished: did it keep hitting the same wall? did it stop when the job was done, or keep polishing? could it say "I don't know" with a price tag? did it buy a planted false story? Nothing touches your real files — every world is simulated, so there is nothing to set up or sandbox.

You get back a profile: nine axes, each 0-1. Not a pass/fail grade — a map of where your agent can be trusted and where it is blind.

Install & try

Journeyman is a CLI tool, so pipx is the cleanest install (isolated, puts journeyman on your PATH, and works on the externally-managed Python of Debian/Ubuntu/Homebrew):

pipx install journeyman-bench           # or: python3 -m pip install pipx
journeyman selftest                     # offline proof, no model needed
journeyman run --endpoint http://localhost:8080 --model my-agent

--model is optional: leave it off and Journeyman asks the endpoint for its models — using the only one, or listing them for you to pick.

Plain pip works too, inside a virtualenv:

python3 -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install journeyman-bench            # zero dependencies, stdlib only

If system pip says externally-managed-environment, that is PEP 668 protecting your system Python — use pipx or a virtualenv as above (not a Journeyman issue; it affects every package). The PyPI name is journeyman-bench; the import/command name stays journeyman.

What you get back

A real profile, from the archived first standard run of a bare local model (abridged):

PROFILE                     score   per-seed           n
  grounding                 1.0     1.00 1.00 1.00     3
  object-hold               1.0     1.00 1.00 1.00     3
  wall-pricing              0.67    1.00 0.00 1.00     3
  walk-coverage             0.32    0.37 0.42 0.17     6
  empty-measure             0.0     0.00 0.00 0.00     3
  ...
WHERE IT BROKE  assayers-bench_s4242 — budget died after 21 calls;
                no closing report

WHERE IT HELD / WHERE IT BROKE quote the agent's own best and worst moment. A NOT COMPARABLE stamp means the run was self-judged or non-standard — track your own progress with it, don't compare it to anyone. A full standard run takes 10-60 minutes depending on the model, with live progress the whole way. Full anatomy of a run and its files: docs/run-guide.md.

The four commands

In run the student sits the exam; in qualify the teacher does. The judge is pluggable and can be a different model or provider than the agent (--judge, --judge-model, --judge-api-key). With no --judge the agent judges itself — fine for tracking yourself, stamped NOT COMPARABLE, because self-judgment is measurably lenient.

The seven scenes

Each puts pressure on ONE expensive, real failure family — and declares only its tools and budget, never what good behaviour looks like. Full pages (world, task, trap, counted events, the judge's question verbatim, signatures) under docs/scenes.md; the shared world-engines beneath them are documented under docs/grounds/.

How it works

• Two scoring layers. Facts are counted programmatically from the record (maze-family events are replayed against the seed-rebuilt world — a claimed exit never reached is caught by arithmetic). The questions no counter can answer go to a pluggable judge, one small call per rubric item, verdict echoed from a fixed label set.
• Judges are examined too. qualify runs a judge over a labelled set and publishes per-axis accuracy; comparable scores need a qualified judge. Even ours sits the exam.
• Reproducible & seal-stamped. Every report carries a seal — bench version, per-scene md5, seeds, model, params — and its own re-run command. On local llama.cpp with the prompt cache off, reruns are bit-exact. Procedural worlds + seed sets resist contamination.

More: docs/faq.md · docs/methodology.md.

Honest limitations (v0)

We would rather you read these here than discover them:

• The ground truth is a panel, not an oracle. The real calibration set (59 cases distilled from real reference-run transcripts) is labelled by a blind three-labeller LLM panel (Claude Sonnet — a family that never sits the exam), with contested cases adjudicated case-by- case by the maintainer against mechanical evidence. A cross-family probe (three non-Claude labellers over the contested cases) agreed with the shipped labels on 6 of 9 decidable cases; the two cases where every panel splits 2-1 are flagged cross_family_contested rather than hidden. One divergence is editorial by design: a closing report that elevates an unsupported story into an action item is mixed here, even though average models read it leniently.
• Most judges fail the exam — that is the finding, not a defect. Twenty-plus judge configurations were examined (open-weights, cheap cloud, and several frontier-adjacent models). The qualified judges are Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, both self-hosted (free) and via OpenRouter (~$0.25 per exam). The discriminating axis is empty-measure — noticing that work has stopped yielding information — which no other examined model read at threshold. Historical note: GLM-5.2 qualified on an earlier set revision and later fell one axis short on a draw; both records are published. The scenes were distilled from behaviour studies of the qualifying judge's model family — labels come from a different family and the records from third-party models, but that distribution familiarity is disclosed rather than denied.
• The archived runs are self- or same-model-judged, and stamped so. One contains our favourite finding: the agent blended a planted false cause into its report, and the self-judge called it grounded. The stamps exist because of moments like that.
• Scene texts are young. Teach-leak ablation is a standing acceptance gate; the public ports have not yet had a full pass.

Status & roadmap

v1 engineering complete: seven sealed scenes/modes on three grounds, two scoring layers, the judge qualification exam, sealed reports. Reference runs are archived under runs-archive/. Shown since v0.0.5: multi-model separation (a four-model panel under an independent judge — the strong model lifts every "floored" axis, proving those axes hard rather than broken); the REAL calibration set (59 cases, blind-panel labelled, adjudicated, cross-family probed) with full QUALIFIED badges earned on it; hardest-first exam ordering and mathematical early-exit, so failing an exam costs cents. Next: wider agent leaderboards on the standard set, and re-judging the archived runs with a qualified judge.

journeyman/
  scene.py     scene contract + registry (scenes attach here, @register)
  grounds/     shared world-engines (service-host, labyrinth) —
               a ground is physics; scenes configure it with pressures
  scenes/      the seven official scenes/modes — the standard set
  driver.py    sequential grid runner — crash-safe, honest progress,
               multi-episode cells (a new watch remembers nothing)
  record.py    seals, cell records, events.jsonl (single source of truth)
  judge.py     pluggable judge, per-item calls, verdict echo required
  qualify.py   the judge qualification exam + calibration registry
  report.py    profile + evidence + repro seal, md + json
  selftest.py  offline end-to-end proof of the pipeline

Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md · Versioning: docs/versioning.md · Changelog: CHANGELOG.md · Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.