Delegation Contract v0.1

Delegation Contract v0.1 defines the minimum context a team records when software work is handed to an agent. It is built for product documentation, issue templates, audit logs, review systems, and research papers comparing coding-agent systems.

Four core contract dimensions

Task entry records how work starts. Common entry points include an issue assignment, a chat prompt, a pull request comment, an IDE command, or an external ticket.

Authority records what the agent can do without asking. L2 requires explicit human approval before execution, while L3 allows the proposed action to proceed without it. Some products have conservative defaults and stronger configurable modes, so profiles name both when the distinction matters.

A work package specifies what the agent must return, whether that is a diff, a branch, a pull request, a test report, a reproduction note, a deployment plan, or a combination of those artifacts.

Acceptance context is the setting where the human decision happens, whether a team accepts a patch in an IDE, reviews a pull request, runs a staging deployment, or routes the result through an internal change-management system.

Automation and acceptance in practice

The specification separates suggestion, planning, execution, and acceptance into levels. The practical split is straightforward: one system proposes a plan, while another executes shell commands, pushes commits, or opens a pull request.

Profiles include an access date when they classify live products because coding-agent systems change quickly. A defensible profile states which documentation version or product state it describes.

Defining the boundaries

Delegation Contract sets boundaries for delegation, not tool ranking, vendor certification, or a legal standard of care. It does not claim that higher autonomy is better. For many production teams, a lower level with clear acceptance gates is the stronger operating model.

The specification does not replace security policy. It describes the delegation shape; teams still need separate controls for credentials, network access, test execution, code review, and deployment.

Versioning notes

The schema identifier is https://delegationcontracts.org/schemas/delegation-contract/v0.1/schema.json. Later versions use semantic versioning, and additions stay backward-compatible within a major version.

JSON Schema is the v0.1 schema.