Where Accountability Lives: Mapping Human Responsibility to Workflow Artifacts in Agentic Software Development

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15678v1
• Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:11:04 GMT
• Title: Where Accountability Lives: Mapping Human Responsibility to Workflow Artifacts in Agentic Software Development
• Abstract summary: Coding agents author, open pull requests, and push code in production repositories.<n>We read both against the workflow events that leave artifacts, across four agentic coding tools and eighteen governing policy documents from seven providers.<n>One provider bars the developer who assigned a task from approving the resulting pull request; another documents an agent that approves pull requests below a configured risk threshold and can dismiss reviews.<n>We replace the usual three-way distinction between enforced, advisory and absent verification with a grid separating whether a mechanism compels the check from who performs it.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Coding agents author commits, open pull requests, and push code in production repositories. Who is accountable is settled in two places that do not refer to each other: the platform controls that gate what an agent may do, and the provider terms that allocate responsibility for what it produces. We read both against the workflow events that leave artifacts, across four agentic coding tools and eighteen governing policy documents from seven providers, recording at each event who holds authority, who executed and under which identity, who must verify, who bears the consequence, and which artifact survives. The layers disagree. One provider bars the developer who assigned a task from approving the resulting pull request; another documents an agent that approves pull requests below a configured risk threshold and can dismiss reviews. We therefore replace the usual three-way distinction between enforced, advisory and absent verification with a grid separating whether a mechanism compels the check from who performs it. Attribution runs in opposite directions across providers, and no trailer is defined for agent authorship, though one provider repurposes the co-authorship trailer for it. We argue that agentic tooling did not create this gap. A decade of code-review research already recorded that the approval artifact carries less than the terms assume. What changes is that this weakness moved from a property of how people work to a property of what a product does: a vendor now documents a product that stands at the approval event and emits the same artifact with no party capable of forming a judgement present. We do not claim the gap harms anyone. The selection rule is equalised across the four tools, every reported absence is re-tested against a doubled page set with the survival rate reported, and the source collection and its scripts are deposited.

Related papers

• Claude Code Complete User Handbook [0.0]
  Claude Code is a language model operating in a loop with unverified access, shell execution, browser control, scheduled and cloud execution.<n>This book is a task-oriented reference for operating that system safely and productively.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-27T07:32:14Z)
• Five Primitives for Governing Autonomous AI Agents at Runtime [0.0]
  We argue that governing autonomous AI agents is a problem, not a model-alignment problem.<n>We derive five primitives from the questions that must be answered before an action takes effect.<n>We describe an implementation in which an agent's action is mediated against policy before it takes effect.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-27T06:53:11Z)
• ROPE: Routed Origin Policy Enforcement against Indirect Prompt Injection [61.4148196085256]
  We present ROPE (Routed Origin Policy Enforcement), which is anchored in a structural notion of trust.<n>Our approach admits two provable guarantees: 1) at every step of a trajectory, no value whose only origin is attacker-writable content reaches an origin-guarded parameter, and 2) no rewording of an injection changes an admission decision.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-27T01:22:14Z)
• CrossAudit: A Git-Native, Cross-Vendor Audit Loop for Agentic Science [5.610929955077264]
  CrossAudit is a protocol for supervising autonomous research pipelines.<n>Each increment of work is audited by an agent from a different vendor against a rulebook a human wrote and versioned.<n>Reports, verdicts, disputes and rulings are git commits, so the supervision history can be re-read and cited.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-05T12:35:59Z)
• Fetch-then-Explore: Decoupling Selection from Extraction over a Persistent Workspace for Search Agents [60.97609995940902]
  We propose textbfFetch-then-Explore for search agents.<n>It separates page selection from evidence extraction and keeps what it selects.<n>It leads BrowseComp accuracy at every backbone and generally matches or exceeds the baselines on WideSearch.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-03T11:58:21Z)
• Do Context Files Help Coding Agents? A Two-Agent Ablation Study on Real Repositories [0.0]
  Persistent context files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md) are standard practice for guiding AI coding agents, yet evidence for their effectiveness is contradictory.<n>We present a controlled ablation of context-injection strategy across two frontier agents (Claude Code and Codex)
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-28T11:07:53Z)
• Self-Authored Verification Is Unreliable in Heuristic Self-Improving Agents [5.91817208489443]
  We study the verifier-acceptance-deployment gap.<n>This gap refers to the discrepancy between an agent's self-authored verification signal and a sealed deployment evaluation.<n>We introduce a Sealed Exogenous Acceptance Loop (SEAL)
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-27T11:45:14Z)
• Agent Security Needs Redefinition through a Holistic Framework [46.88917910966891]
  Defenses ask whether an instruction looks malicious. Benchmarks ask whether an agent performs a harmful sounding action.<n>We operationalize contextual security through four properties that must hold jointly and be evaluated continuously across the agent's trajectory.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-24T06:43:09Z)
• Tencent WorkBuddy Bench: A Multi-Domain Coding-Agent Benchmark with Contamination-Resistant Task Construction [57.138342889101345]
  Tencent WorkBuddy Bench is a multi-domain evaluation suite for coding agents.<n>This report documents its construction methodology, scoring protocol, and a cross-model leaderboard.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-23T04:34:06Z)
• Capable but Careless: Do Computer-Use Agents Follow Contextual Integrity? [54.701199583505144]
  Cross-application access creates a privacy risk that has been largely overlooked.<n>We introduce AgentCIBench, an evaluation harness that turns this risk into executable, deterministically scored scenarios.<n>We evaluate 15 frontier agents and find a surprisingly high failure rate.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-06-22T11:36:58Z)
• Collaborative Human-Agent Protocol (CHAP) [0.18352113484137622]
  This paper presents CHAP, the Collaborative Human-Agent Protocol.<n>Under CHAP, the override that used to vanish into a chat thread becomes a structured event carrying a diff, a rationale, and a content hash.<n>The protocol achieves this through a small Core (workspaces, participants, tasks, artefacts, and an append-only evidence log) together with composable profiles that add review, modes, routing, deliberation, handoff, identity, signatures, and transparency-backed audit as deployments require them.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-06-08T17:11:42Z)
• Who Owns This Agent? Tracing AI Agents Back to Their Owners [7.444382451377645]
  AI agents are increasingly deployed to act autonomously in the world.<n>There is still no reliable way to trace a harmful agent back to the account that deployed it.<n>This is the first work to define the problem and present a practical solution.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-15T15:10:33Z)
• 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)
• On the Resilience of LLM-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration with Faulty Agents [58.79302663733703]
  Large language model-based multi-agent systems have shown great abilities across various tasks due to the collaboration of expert agents.<n>The impact of clumsy or even malicious agents--those who frequently make errors in their tasks--on the overall performance of the system remains underexplored.<n>This paper investigates what is the resilience of various system structures under faulty agents on different downstream tasks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-02T03:25:20Z)
• Same or Different? Diff-Vectors for Authorship Analysis [78.83284164605473]
  In classic'' authorship analysis a feature vector represents a document, the value of a feature represents (an increasing function of) the relative frequency of the feature in the document, and the class label represents the author of the document. Our experiments tackle same-author verification, authorship verification, and closed-set authorship attribution; while DVs are naturally geared for solving the 1st, we also provide two novel methods for solving the 2nd and 3rd.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-01-24T08:48:12Z)

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.