@inproceedings{kc-budathoki-2026-handoff,
title = "Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks",
author = "KC, Dipesh and
Budathoki, Anjila",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.738/",
pages = "17110--17126",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
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 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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<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 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.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks
%A KC, Dipesh
%A Budathoki, Anjila
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F kc-budathoki-2026-handoff
%X 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 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.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.738/
%P 17110-17126
Markdown (Informal)
[Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.738/) (KC & Budathoki, EMNLP 2026)
ACL