AINeutralarXiv – CS AI · 7h ago6/10
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Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks
Researchers introduce 'handoff debt,' a framework measuring the efficiency cost when coding agents resume interrupted tasks from incomplete states. Testing across 75 tasks and 724 takeover runs, they found that providing context-bearing handoff information (traces, notes, structured documentation) reduces agent event counts by 20-59% and token consumption by 42-63% compared to repository-only takeover, suggesting current agent benchmarks underestimate real-world deployment costs.