{"slug": "the-delegation-test-is-whether-you-can-write-the-check-first", "title": "The delegation test is whether you can write the check first", "summary": "A developer argues that the right criterion for delegating work to a coding agent is not task difficulty but whether an acceptance check can be written before work begins, since unspecified tasks — not hard ones — are what cause repeated failed handoffs. The developer recommends writing the acceptance criteria as a separate artifact first, noting that the practice also makes work handoff-ready for human teammates, while warning that delegating only the mechanical half of a role can hollow it out.", "body_md": "Every discussion I see about what to hand off to a coding agent sorts tasks by difficulty. Easy things to the agent, hard things to the human. It sounds obvious and it has been wrong in practice for me almost every time.\n\nThe axis that actually predicts a good handoff is not difficulty. It is this: **can you write down, before any work starts, what would make you accept the result?**\n\nIf you can write the check, hand it off. If you cannot, the task is not ready to hand to anybody.\n\nI have handed off genuinely hard work that went fine, because the definition of done was mechanical: migrate this to the new API, all existing tests keep passing, add coverage for the two error paths. Hard, bounded, checkable.\n\nI have also handed off something trivial that came back four times, because what I actually wanted was \"make this error message less alarming\", and I had no way to say what less alarming meant. That is not a hard task. It is an unspecified one, and the agent did nothing wrong - it produced four defensible answers to a question I had not asked properly.\n\nThe failure was mine, and difficulty had nothing to do with it.\n\nThe useful discipline is to write the acceptance check first, as a separate artifact, before writing a single line of instruction.\n\nCheckable:\n\nNot checkable, as written:\n\nThe trick with the second list is that it is usually not one task. It is a decision wearing a task costume. \"Make onboarding less intimidating\" contains a judgement call - what counts as intimidating, and what are we willing to lose - and that part is yours. Once you have made it, what remains is checkable: cut the signup form to three fields, defer the rest to first use, keep the existing validation behaviour.\n\nSo the sequence is decide, write the check, then delegate. Skipping to delegate is what produces four rounds of nearly-right work.\n\nTwo things I did not expect from working this way.\n\nFirst, if you rigorously delegate everything checkable, what remains on your own plate is pure judgement. That is more tiring, not less. The mechanical tasks were also the ones you could do while half awake, and they let you warm up into a day. Losing all of them at once is a real cost and nobody warns you about it.\n\nSecond, and more useful: **the check is not agent infrastructure, it is people infrastructure.** A bounded task with a written acceptance criterion is something you can hand to a teammate who has never touched that part of the system. Without the check they need the context you have. With it, they need the check and a couple of hours.\n\nThat reframing changed how I think about the whole exercise. I started writing acceptance criteria to make agents behave and ended up with a backlog that more of the team could pick up. [Wagglet has a good piece on that specific side effect](https://wagglet.com/blog/meaningful-work-with-human-ai-pairs) - handoffs as a way for more people to contribute rather than purely a throughput trick, including the caveat that the same mechanism can hollow out a role if you only ever hand out the mechanical half.\n\nThat caveat is real, and it is the reason I would not automate the decision step even when I could. The check is the part you write. It is also the part that is actually your job.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-delegation-test-is-whether-you-can-write-the-check-first", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/sam_novak_574b07811e18495/the-delegation-test-is-whether-you-can-write-the-check-first-2c08", "published_at": "2026-09-10 09:08:05+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-10 09:22:58.641427+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Wagglet"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-delegation-test-is-whether-you-can-write-the-check-first", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-delegation-test-is-whether-you-can-write-the-check-first.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-delegation-test-is-whether-you-can-write-the-check-first.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-delegation-test-is-whether-you-can-write-the-check-first.jsonld"}}