Paper

The companion paper is currently titled “Delegated Software Agents.” It argues that agentic software work should be described as delegation, not generic automation.

The paper is being prepared as an arXiv preprint. Until a public preprint is available, cite the project page when discussing the vocabulary.

Citation draft

Schmalbach, Vincent. “Delegated Software Agents.” Draft manuscript, 2026

Research applications

The paper applies the framework to current coding-agent systems and shows how one product category can mask differences in task entry points, authority boundaries, work packages, and acceptance gates.