Improving Environment-Agnostic Coding Agents: The Role of Scaffolding
arXiv:2610.22289v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stronger language models may increasingly construct useful procedures for themselves, reducing the advantage of developer-supplied scaffolding. We investigate why this advantage persists and whether an environment-agnostic agent can be improved without environment-specific engineering. We evaluate a Codex-based agent in two nearly identical prompt variants on ARC-AGI-3, AGI Maze, and Terminal-Bench. Each variant is deployed with unchanged code, pr…