Equation 44 · Why Coding Agents Fail: Long-Horizon Reliability in OpenAI Codex
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Checkpoint placement is a value-of-information problem. Let an unchecked latent error at stage i create expected downstream loss , a check cost , detection probability , and false-alarm cost . A check is favorable when, approximately, . High-value checkpoints occur before expensive or irreversible transitions: after specification, before schema migration, after dependency changes, before broad refactors, before network or credential escalation, and before merge or deployment. Cheap deterministic checks should run earlier and more often than expensive human review.
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