Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks
Quick Take
The study introduces 'handoff debt,' quantifying the rediscovery costs when coding agents take over incomplete tasks. Evaluating 75 tasks, context-aware handoffs reduced median agent events by 20-59% and cumulative prompt tokens by 42-63%, highlighting the importance of detailed task context for efficient agent transitions.
Key Points
- Handoff debt arises from opaque or incomplete predecessor work.
- The protocol generated 181 handoff-point tasks and 724 takeover runs.
- Context-aware handoffs improved efficiency by reducing agent events significantly.
- Solved-rate effects varied by model but efficiency gains were consistent.
- Evaluation should include costs for agents resuming tasks.
Article Content
From source RSS / original summaryarXiv:2606. 02875v1 Announce Type: new 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.
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