Embiricos: Scaffolding-heavy AI agents are limited by developers' mental capacity
Alexander Embiricos · ChatGPT Codex: The Missing Manual · May 16, 2025 · at 30:37
Alexander Embiricos, engineer on OpenAI's ChatGPT Codex team, contrasts building deterministic state-machine scaffolding around LLMs versus training models to reason and plan end-to-end.
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“A lot of, like, agents that I see are really impressive, but it's basically, like, part of what's impressive is it's like a bunch of developers building this, like, really bespoke state machine around a bunch of, like, short model calls, and so then the upper bound of, like, complexity of problem that the model can tackle is kind of actually just what can fit in the developer's brain, right?”
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“The way we see people who, like, love Codex the most using it is they don't, they think for, like, maybe 30 seconds max about their prompt. It's just like, oh, I have this idea, like, boom. Oh, like, there's this thing I wanna do, like, boom. Oh, like, I just …”
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“Good architecture is like even more important than ever. And like, I guess the fun thing is like for now, that's something that humans are really good at. So like, you know, kind of good, you know, important for the software engineers to do their job.”