When Terminal-Agent Training Stalls: Demystifying Data Generation and Verification Challenge

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Using a frontier model like Claude Opus as a meta-agent to generate terminal tasks and verifiers for RL training is increasingly common. Yet a runnable Docker image and executable test suite do not guarantee a faithful end-to-end pipeline for terminal agent training. We present a meta-agent pipeline motivated by this gap, diagnosing three classes of failure: benchmark invalidity, harness brittleness, and reward misalignment. Prompt redesign and context extension raise baseline solvability 5.6 times, but a 9B model saturates at 81.3% mean pass@2 within 20 steps on Claude Opus-generated tasks. Adding hard tasks reduces mean pass@2 to 20.6% without changing the training configuration, a strong evidence that the solvability band is model-specific. These findings demonstrate that meta-agent reliability requires solvability-band calibration, verifier audits, and infrastructure error accounting as first-class evaluation criteria, not post-hoc diagnost.