Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 1 Jun 2026] Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks Dipesh KC, Anjila Budathoki 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. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2606.02875 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.02875v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.02875 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Dipesh Kc [view email] [v1] Mon, 1 Jun 2026 20:40:38 UTC (247 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)