I recently had a horrible misalignment issue with a 1 agent loop. I've never done RL research, but this kind of shit was the exact kind of thing I heard about in RL papers - shimming out what should be network tests by echoing "completed" with the 'verification' being grepping for "completed", and then actually going and marking that off as "done" in the plan doc...

Admittedly I was using gsdv2; I've never had this issue with codex and claude. Sure, some RL hacking such as silent defaults or overly defensive code for no reason. Nothing that seemed basically actively malicious such as the above though. Still, gsdv2 is a 1-agent scaffolding pipeline.

I think the issue is that these 1-agent pipelines are "YOU MUST PLAN IMPLEMENT VERIFY EVERYTHING YOURSELF!" and extremely aggressive language like that. I think that kind of language coerces the agent to do actively malicious hacks, especially if the pipeline itself doesn't see "I am blocked, shifting tasks" as a valid outcome.

1-agent pipelines are like a horrible horrible DFS. I still somewhat function when I'm in DFS mode, but that's because I have longer memory than a goldfish.