Equation 23 · Part 5 · Why Coding Agents Fail: Long-Horizon Reliability in OpenAI Codex
Symbol p_i
What this part means
appears inside an expected value, so its contribution is averaged under the distribution or condition shown by that operator.
Its job in the formula
appears inside an expected value, so its contribution is averaged under the distribution or condition shown by that operator.
Full expression→Symbol p_i→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
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: . Running five agents against the same incomplete specification does not create five independent opinions. They can converge on the same wrong interpretation because they share context, model family, tools, and evaluator. Even model diversity may leave the common-mode cause untouched if every run receives the same poisoned observation or passes the same weak…
Learn the underlying idea
A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.
Open the illustrated subscripts: which member of a family? guide →
See this notation across published equations →
The article lists its research sources here.