Stop Overengineering Agentic Workflows: Markdown Scaffolding for Procedural Control in Agentic IDEs

This paper introduces Markdown Scaffolding, a file-based control pattern for well-scoped procedural workflows in agentic IDEs. Instead of placing task-specific control logic in external orchestration code, the method organizes workflow procedures, routing guidance, rule modules, corpus-backed examples, and preflight validation checks in linked Markdown files. The paper presents an implementable design pattern for semi-structured text-transformation tasks and discusses limitations, failure modes, and directions for controlled evaluation. It does not claim measured performance gains or benchmark results.