[2605.07062] From Assistance to Agency: Rethinking Autonomy and Control in CI/CD Pipelines

Computer Science > Software Engineering arXiv:2605.07062 (cs) [Submitted on 8 May 2026] Title:From Assistance to Agency: Rethinking Autonomy and Control in CI/CD Pipelines Authors:Marcus Emmanuel Barnes, Taher A. Ghaleb, Safwat Hassan View a PDF of the paper titled From Assistance to Agency: Rethinking Autonomy and Control in CI/CD Pipelines, by Marcus Emmanuel Barnes and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:AI agents are assuming active roles in Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) workflows, yet the research community lacks a shared vocabulary for describing what it means for CI/CD to be agentic, how much decision authority is delegated, and where control should reside. This paper presents a vision of agentic CI/CD in which the central challenge is not improving task performance but designing authority transfer, defined as the delegation of operational decisions from human-controlled pipelines to agent systems under specified constraints and recourse mechanisms. To structure this argument, we introduce a distinction between data-plane authority (localized interventions such as patch generation and test reruns) and control-plane authority (modifications to pipeline configuration, deployment policies, and approval gates). Drawing on research prototypes and industrial platforms, we show that current systems operate mainly at the data plane under bounded autonomy, with safety achieved through surrounding governance infrastructure rather t...