The paper "Babysitting AI Agents: A User-Centered Taxonomy and Study of Agentic Delegation Failures" presents MANDATE, a taxonomy of 23 failure categories across seven groups, derived from 163,487 Reddit posts about AI agent use. A follow‑up study with 73 users explored how failure prevalence, severity, and noticeability interrelate, revealing that more severe failures are harder to notice and prior experience increases noticeability. The authors also evaluate research maturity for each failure type, highlighting under‑studied issues such as agents running without progress, and suggest directions to improve user oversight and research focus.
arXiv:2602.02475v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents often fail in ways that are difficult to localize because executions are probabilistic, long-horizon, multi-agent, and mediated by noisy...
The paper titled "Professional Software Developers Don't Vibe, They Control: AI Agent Use for Coding in 2025" examines how experienced developers employ AI agents in software development. Through field observations and surveys, it finds that developers value agents for productivity but maintain control over design and implementation to ensure quality. They use agents as collaborative tools rather than full delegation, selecting tasks based on suitability and leveraging their expertise to guide agent behavior.
arXiv:2609.23939v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective communication between users and AI agents is essential for human-AI collaboration. The XY problem is a well-known communication pitfall where...
The paper examines how users delegate tasks to the AI agent OpenClaw by analyzing 73,093 Reddit posts. It identifies 21 human values grouped into six categories—such as Autonomous Operation, Dependable Operation, Affordable Operation, Bounded Reach, Reviewability, and Equitable Access—and finds that values are largely satisfied when users describe the agent’s outputs but often unmet when users discuss supervising the agent. The authors term this pattern "value‑sensitive delegation," emphasizing that supporting human values requires attention to both what an agent does and the conditions users set around its use.
arXiv:2606. 05391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous 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.
arXiv:2606.00341v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As AI agents are increasingly deployed in real personal and corporate settings (email accounts, development workflows, company databases, etc...
arXiv:2605.29442v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI coding agents increasingly act directly within software environments, yet existing analyses of their failures rely on benchmark trajectori...
arXiv:2602. 16666v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents are increasingly deployed to execute important tasks.
The paper introduces a co‑evolving framework where a target agent improves by learning from its own failures, and a separate failure agent is trained to generate hard negative trajectories. These hard negatives, derived from plausible but incorrect attempts, help the target agent better distinguish successful behavior from subtle errors. Experiments on online shopping, scientific reasoning, and interactive SQL querying show a 5.7% average reward improvement over baseline methods.
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons. Reported benchmark gains often obscure recurring failure modes documented across otherwise unrelated evaluation efforts.
The paper discusses the need to adapt incident reporting frameworks for AI agents, which are rapidly deployed and face unique security challenges. By comparing AI systems and agents and consulting 23 experts, the authors identify key reporting elements such as agent memory, autonomy levels, and tool usage. They also highlight open research questions, potential reporting weaknesses like data leakage, and outline privacy requirements for secure AI agent deployment.
arXiv:2607. 05775v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons.