{"slug": "handoff-debt-the-rediscovery-cost-when-coding-agents-take-over-interrupted-tasks", "title": "Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks", "summary": "A new study introduces \"handoff debt,\" the rediscovery cost incurred when a coding agent resumes an interrupted task left by another agent or engineer. Testing across 75 source tasks and 724 takeover runs per model, researchers found that providing context-bearing handoffs, such as summary notes, reduced median agent events by 20-59% and cumulative prompt tokens by 42-63% compared to repository-only takeovers. The findings argue that coding-agent benchmarks should measure not just task completion, but the efficiency cost of resuming work from a predecessor's partial state.", "body_md": "arXiv:2606.02875v1 Announce Type: new\nAbstract: 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.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/handoff-debt-the-rediscovery-cost-when-coding-agents-take-over-interrupted-tasks", "canonical_source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02875", "published_at": "2026-06-03 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-03 04:17:36.380042+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "large-language-models", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-research"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/handoff-debt-the-rediscovery-cost-when-coding-agents-take-over-interrupted-tasks", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/handoff-debt-the-rediscovery-cost-when-coding-agents-take-over-interrupted-tasks.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/handoff-debt-the-rediscovery-cost-when-coding-agents-take-over-interrupted-tasks.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/handoff-debt-the-rediscovery-cost-when-coding-agents-take-over-interrupted-tasks.jsonld"}}