coding-agent-scaffoldlisted

# Coding agent scaffold Source: [Raising the bar on SWE-bench Verified with Claude 3.5 Sonnet](https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/swe-bench-sonnet). The procedure circulates as tutorials and reference codebases (Thorsten Ball's "How to build an agent" is the canonical one). None ship it as a skill focused on tool-interface design, which is the part that decides reliability. A strong coding agent does not need elaborate scaffolding. It needs two tools designed with the care you would give a UI, and the freedom to decide its own order of operations. The scaffolding encodes your guesses about what the model cannot do, and those guesses age badly as models improve. Keep it thin. ## Give the model control, suggest the order Do not hard-code a rigid pipeline. In the prompt, suggest a shape and let the model deviate when the task calls for it: explore the code, reproduce the problem, make the fix, verify it, then check edge cases. A suggested sequence guides without boxing in a model that often knows a better route for the specific bug. Let the agent keep sampling until it finishes or hits the context limit. Expect a high token and turn count on hard tasks; that is the cost of letting the model work the problem. ## Tool 1: bash One parameter, a single command string. No XML wrapping, no escaping scheme the model has to satisfy on top of normal shell quoting. Write the description the way you would brief a careful new engineer on an unfamiliar machine. Cover the things the