Equation 21 · Why Coding Agents Fail: Long-Horizon Reliability in OpenAI Codex
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Symbol Z
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What the article says around this equation
The product formula is most misleading when failures share a cause. Let Z represent a latent condition such as an ambiguous requirement, poisoned dependency, missing platform constraint, or flawed test oracle. Conditional on Z , stages or parallel agents may appear independent; marginally, their errors are correlated:
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