Where Accountability Lives: Mapping Human Responsibility to Workflow Artifacts in Agentic Software Development

Abstract

Coding agents author commits, open pull requests and push code in production repositories. Responsibility is settled in two layers that do not refer to each other: platform controls gating what an agent may do, and provider terms allocating responsibility for its output. Objective: Where the two layers disagree at a workflow event, and what each states there about authority, execution, verification, consequence and record. Method: A qualitative document study of 121 items archived byte-exact: documentation for four agentic coding tools, the platform controls on their output, and eighteen policy documents from seven providers, read by deductive content analysis against an a-priori system of five dimensions and nine workflow events. An independent second coder blind-recoded the verification-mechanism classification, a complete enumeration and not a sample (Cohen's kappa 0.81, n = 13, on whether a mechanism compels; 0.75, n = 12, on who performs it). Results: Cursor's terms make the user responsible for evaluating the use of any suggestion; its documentation describes a product that performs that evaluation and records it as an approval. No collected artifact records that the verification the terms make the user's duty took place. At merge two tools compel a person, one documents an agent approving below a configured risk threshold, and one only advises. Six of the fifteen mechanisms that compel a check have a default the vendor states; nine have one this study inferred. Readers who had not made them refuted five of the eight absence claims; three survived, one materially qualified. Conclusions: The terms attach duty and consequence to output as a class, the platform records events, nothing records the duty discharged. One vendor documents a product that forms the approval judgement, and the terms allocate consequence against the artifact regardless.