Software Delegation Contracts: Measuring Reviewability in AI Coding-Agent Work
AI coding agents increasingly accept assigned software tasks, modify repositories under bounded authority, and return work packages for review. Prior work proposed the software delegation contract, covering the task, authority, returned work package, and acceptance context, as the unit of analysis for delegated coding work, but did not measure its effects. This paper reports a controlled pilot study of explicit delegation contracts for coding agents. We built a dependency-free TypeScript API task environment with seeded defects and documentation gaps, authored ten tasks across five families, and ran 64 agent executions across two model tiers under three conditions: a realistic issue-style...
| Authors | Vincent Schmalbach |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 14 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 June 2026 |
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