Deliberate Pacing for Human Oversight in Agentic Software Development

Tobias Reichel, Michèle Stassen, Anamaria Mojica-Hanke, Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Sebastian Baltes +2

Agentic AI increasingly enables software development activities to proceed without continuous human involvement. While this autonomy may accelerate development, it also raises questions about when developers can meaningfully oversee software development done by agents. We propose deliberate pacing: intentionally adjusting when and how autonomous development proceeds to preserve opportunities for meaningful oversight. Drawing on an exploratory multivocal literature review of 20 sources, we identify three factors motivating this vision: changing relative costs of human involvement, the timing of oversight opportunities, and interdependencies between pacing decisions across the software development life cycle. We argue that neither uninterrupted autonomy nor frequent human intervention is universal. Instead, pacing should balance opportunities to understand and influence consequential decisions against costs in human attention, development time, and rework. We outline a research agenda to investigate when deliberate pacing is beneficial, how intervention timing affects oversight, and how pacing decisions interact across development activities.