Agent Scaffolding

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

Agent scaffolding is the training wheels and guardrails wrapped around a model so it acts like a competent worker rather than a genius with no discipline. It's the prompts, retry logic, and structured steps that turn 'brilliant but occasionally unhinged' into 'reliably finishes the task.' Better scaffolding can make a smaller model outperform a bigger one that's left to freestyle.

Real Talk

Agent scaffolding refers to the prompting, tool schemas, control flow, and error-handling code layered around a model to make it perform agentic tasks reliably rather than relying on the raw model's judgment at every step. On coding benchmarks like SWE-bench, improvements to scaffolding alone have produced larger score jumps than swapping in a stronger underlying model.

When You'll Hear This

"Better scaffolding got us a 15-point jump on the benchmark with the same model." / "We rewrote the scaffolding, not the prompt."