Improving Environment-Agnostic Coding Agents: The Role of Scaffolding

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, prompts, and general-purpose tools across environments, receiving environment-specific information as input. Changing only an instruction to encourage reporting difficulties and returning control for automatic continuation improves mean scores on b...

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