Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks
The paper discusses the concept of 'handoff debt' in coding tasks where agents take over interrupted work. It evaluates how the efficiency of successor agents can be improved by providing different levels of context during task handoffs. The findings suggest that better handoff practices can significantly reduce the rediscovery costs for agents resuming tasks.
- ▪The study introduces the term 'handoff debt' to describe the rediscovery costs when coding agents take over tasks.
- ▪A protocol was developed to evaluate successor agents under various handoff conditions, generating a significant amount of data for analysis.
- ▪Results indicated that context-bearing handoffs can reduce median agent events by 20-59% and cumulative prompt tokens by 42-63%.
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2606.02875 (cs) [Submitted on 1 Jun 2026] Title:Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks Authors:Dipesh KC, Anjila Budathoki View a PDF of the paper titled Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks, by Dipesh KC and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) 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.
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