Handoff Debt Measured in Agent Task Takeovers
Paper measures handoff costs in interrupted coding-agent workflows, finding consistent efficiency gains from context but variable solve-rate effects.
The arXiv paper quantifies rediscovery costs when successor coding agents resume interrupted tasks from four handoff views. Across 75 source tasks the protocol produced 181 handoff points and 724 takeover runs. Context-bearing handoffs cut median agent events 20-59% and prompt tokens 42-63% versus repository-state only.
Primary results show solved-rate gains remain model-dependent while efficiency reductions hold across three successor models. The protocol freezes repositories at deterministic points to isolate the effect of opaque or incomplete predecessor states.
Related evaluations such as SWE-Bench focus solely on uninterrupted resolution and omit resumption metrics entirely. The current protocol therefore exposes a measurement gap in existing agent benchmarks that report only final solve rates.
AXIOM: Structured handoff notes lower resumption token use by more than 40 percent, indicating current single-agent benchmarks understate real workflow overhead.
Sources (2)
- [1]Primary Source(https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02875)
- [2]Related Source(https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06770)