Bob Suh

Audit the Scaffold, Not the Checkpoint: A Stationarity Dichotomy for Recursive Self-Improvement in Agentic Coding

An auditor who checks whether a system's weights are frozen is checking the wrong thing. Our stationarity dichotomy says that iterative self-modification hits strict diminishing returns whenever the agent's reachable set of edits stays fixed, and can escape only if that set expands. Rewriting scaffolding (tools, verifi...