Scaffolding is coping not scaling, and other lessons from Codex | OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux

If you rely on complex scaffolding to build AI agents you aren't scaling you are coping. Thibault Sottiaux from OpenAI’s Codex team joins us to explain why they are ruthlessly removing the harness to solve for true agentic autonomy. We discuss the bitter lesson of vertical integration, why scalable primitives beat clever tricks, and how the rise of the super bus factor is reshaping engineering careers.

LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor

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• OpenAI Codex: Learn more about the models powering tools like GitHub Copilot.
• Codex Open Source Repo: The lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal (check out the Rust migration mentioned in the episode).
• Agent Skills Open Standard: The open standard and catalog for giving agents new capabilities.
• The Bitter Lesson: Richard Sutton’s essay on why compute-centric methods win in AI.
• Follow Tibo on X @thsottiaux | GitHub

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