Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02875v1
• Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:40:38 GMT
• Title: Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks
• Abstract summary: Real software work is messier because tasks are interrupted, reassigned, reviewed, and resumed from partial states left by another agent or engineer.<n>We study this missing dimension through emphhandoff debt: the rediscovery cost imposed when a predecessor's work is opaque or incomplete.<n>Our takeover protocol interrupts a coding agent at deterministic handoff points, freezes the repository, and evaluates successor agents under four handoff views.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Coding-agent benchmarks evaluate whether a single uninterrupted agent can resolve a repository issue. Real software work is messier: tasks are interrupted, reassigned, reviewed, and resumed from partial states left by another agent or engineer. We study this missing dimension through \emph{handoff debt}: the rediscovery cost imposed when a predecessor's work is opaque or incomplete. Our takeover protocol interrupts a coding agent at deterministic handoff points, freezes the repository, and evaluates successor agents under four handoff views: repository state only, raw trace, summary notes, and structured notes. Across 75 source tasks, the protocol generates 181 handoff-point tasks and 724 takeover runs per successor model. Across three successor models, context-bearing handoffs reduce median agent events by 20--59\% and cumulative prompt tokens by 42--63\% relative to repository-only takeover. Solved-rate effects are smaller and model-dependent, but efficiency gains are consistent. These findings suggest that coding-agent evaluation should report not only whether a task is solved, but also how costly that work is for another agent to resume.

Related papers

• AuditCoder: Responsibility-Preserving Task Graphs for Auditable Code Generation and Bounded Repair [2.2743778085578437]
  AuditCoder treats the program and an auditable construction trace as joint outputs.<n>For tasks with stable, locally testable boundaries, the graph functions not only as a decomposition structure but also as a persistent index for validation and repair.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-31T15:29:14Z)
• AgentAbstain: Do LLM Agents Know When Not to Act? [19.223843408018997]
  Existing evaluations mostly focus on task success rather than whether agents know when to abstain.<n>We present the first systematic evaluation framework for agentic abstention: the calibrated ability of tool-using LLM agents to recognize when not to act.<n>AgentAbstain is a paired-task benchmark built on an agent-native taxonomy of 8 abstention scenarios across pre-execution reasoning and runtime discovery.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-11T00:57:36Z)
• The Best-Laid SCHEMEs: Coordinated Sabotage and Monitoring in Multi-Agent Systems [0.0]
  SCHEME is a benchmark of 17 task instances across 7 settings and 8 real open-source libraries.<n>Each setting is designed so that no proper subset of agents can succeed alone.<n>We show coordinated sabotage is already practical with GPT 5.1 Codex and Gemini 3.1 Pro.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-27T23:30:21Z)
• Persistent AI Agents in Academic Research: A Single-Investigator Implementation Case Study [0.0]
  The unit of analysis was the persistent human-agent environment: researcher, agent, memory layer, tools, repositories, scheduled jobs, specialized agent roles, and governance rules.<n>A strict May 2026 trajectory subset captured 627 model-related events and 73.95 million recorded tokens, of which 82.9% were cache reads.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-26T11:28:36Z)
• RepoMirage: Probing Repository Context Reasoning in Code Agents with Perturbations [51.43574078961796]
  We introduce RepoMirage, a two-stage evaluation suite built on SWE-Bench Verified.<n>RepoMirage-Perturb applies three types of semantics-preserving repository-level perturbations, revealing a clear performance drop when correct solving requires broader context access.<n>We propose RepoAnchor, a structure-first prototype workflow that separates repository exploration from downstream problem solving.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-25T06:26:43Z)
• ClawForge: Generating Executable Interactive Benchmarks for Command-Line Agents [59.626170560327274]
  We present textbfClawForge, a generator-backed benchmark framework for executable command-line categories under state conflict.<n>We instantiate this framework as the ClawForge-Bench (17 scenarios, 6 ability categories)
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-13T21:34:08Z)
• AgentLens: Revealing The Lucky Pass Problem in SWE-Agent Evaluation [11.272830796781925]
  We evaluate 2,614 OpenHands trajectories from eight model backends on 60 SWE-bench Verified tasks.<n>Among passing trajectories in this subset, 10.7% exhibit behavior we call a Lucky Pass.<n>We introduce AgentLens, a framework for process-level assessment of SWE-agent trajectories.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-13T03:00:57Z)
• EnactToM: An Evolving Benchmark for Functional Theory of Mind in Embodied Agents [75.01735520608075]
  Existing benchmarks mostly test literal Theory of Mind (ToM) by asking direct belief questions.<n>We introduce EnactToM, an evolving benchmark of 300 embodied multi-agent tasks set in a 3D household.<n>On the hard split, all seven evaluated frontier models score 0.0% Pass3 on functional task completion, while averaging 45.0% on literal belief probes.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-11T00:04:19Z)
• BUILD-AND-FIND: An Effort-Aware Protocol for Evaluating Agent-Managed Codebases [0.0]
  We introduce BUILD-AND-FIND, a protocol for evaluating whether downstream agents can recover intended choices from generated repositories.<n>For each task, a builder sees a hidden repository specification and creates a specification-traced multiple-choice question bank.<n>The protocol separates behavioral correctness from artifact-side recovery and reports recovery accuracy, repeatability, implementation coverage, and inspection effort.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-07T12:35:27Z)
• Claw-Eval-Live: A Live Agent Benchmark for Evolving Real-World Workflows [67.92316850084575]
  We introduce Claw-Eval-Live, a live benchmark for workflow agents.<n>Each release is constructed from public workflow-demand signals.<n>Claw-Eval-Live records execution traces, audit logs, service state, and post-run workspace artifacts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-04-30T17:23:19Z)
• A Benchmark for Evaluating Repository-Level Code Agents with Intermediate Reasoning on Feature Addition Task [11.218318079376365]
  RACE-bench is a reasoning-augmented benchmark for evaluating code agents on feature addition tasks.<n> RACE-bench contains 528 real-world feature addition instances from 12 open-source repositories.<n>We evaluate three representative repository-level code agents on RACE-bench.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-27T11:58:47Z)
• A Rubric-Supervised Critic from Sparse Real-World Outcomes [87.11204512676193]
  Real-world coding agents operate with humans in the loop, where success signals are typically noisy, delayed, and sparse.<n>We propose a process to learn a "critic" model from sparse and noisy interaction data, which can then be used both as a reward model for either RL-based training or inference-time scaling.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-04T07:23:54Z)
• Localizing Task Information for Improved Model Merging and Compression [61.16012721460561]
  We show that the information required to solve each task is still preserved after merging as different tasks mostly use non-overlapping sets of weights. We propose Consensus Merging, an algorithm that eliminates such weights and improves the general performance of existing model merging approaches.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-13T14:54:37Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.