Hedwig: Dynamic Autonomy for Coding Agents Under Local Oversight

TL;DR

Hedwig is a CLI coding agent that dynamically adjusts its autonomy level by learning from developer interactions, reducing friction and improving collaboration over time.

Contribution

The paper introduces Hedwig, a novel coding agent that adapts its autonomy based on ongoing developer feedback, unlike static permission systems.

Findings

Hedwig reduces developer frustration with autonomy calibration.

It learns behavioral guidelines from user feedback over sessions.

Hedwig adapts autonomy to build trust and improve collaboration.

Abstract

Despite coding agents' advances in handling increasingly complex tasks, their continued tendency to introduce unintended edits, subtle bugs, and scope drift that slip past code review means developers must still decide how much autonomy to grant them. However, existing approaches for setting an agent's level of autonomy, such as static permission settings or instruction files, cannot account for how developers' preferences for agent autonomy can shift across tasks and over time. We conducted a formative survey with 21 software engineers who use coding agents and found that they experience frustration with calibrating autonomy and have evolving preferences for level of oversight. Building on these insights, we present Hedwig, a CLI coding agent that dynamically adjusts its autonomy level based on developer-agent interactions across sessions. Rather than operating on a global, fixed autonomy configuration, Hedwig learns an evolving set of behavioral guidelines from developer decisions and feedback, reducing friction on work for which the agent has earned trust, while tightening oversight when the agent operates outside familiar territory. Hedwig demonstrates the potential of a new paradigm where agents intelligently adapt their level of autonomy based on user trust through active, longitudinal collaboration.