CodeFlowBench: A Multi-turn, Iterative Benchmark for Complex Code Generation

Modern software development demands code that is maintainable, testable, and scalable by organizing the implementation into modular components with iterative reuse of existing codes. We formalize this iterative, multi-turn paradigm as codeflow and introduce CodeFlowBench, the first benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate LLMs' ability to perform codeflow - implementing new functionality by reusing existing functions over multiple turns. CodeFlowBench comprises two complementary components: CodeFlowBench-Comp, a core collection of 5,000+ competitive programming problems from Codeforces updated via an automated pipeline and CodeFlowBench-Repo, which is sourced from GitHub repositories to better reflect real-world scenarios. Furthermore, a novel evaluation framework featured dual assessment protocol and structural metrics derived from dependency trees is introduced. Extensive experiments reveal significant performance degradation in multi-turn codeflow scenarios. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis illustrates that model performance inversely correlates with dependency complexity. These findings not only highlight the critical challenges for supporting real-world workflows, but also establish CodeFlowBench as an essential tool for advancing code generation research.