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agency-agents Needs a Role Handoff Card Before It Needs More Personas

A developer proposes adding a handoff card to the agency-agents repository, a collection of specialized AI agent roles, to track authority and responsibility transitions between roles. The handoff card would document the from/to roles, reason, evidence, unresolved items, authority level, and base revision, with rejections requiring a reason and returning ownership. The developer also outlines a research protocol to test design safety by measuring whether participants can predict tool effects before approving handoffs.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 22, 2026

msitarzewski/agency-agents is an MIT-licensed collection of specialized AI agent roles with different personalities, processes, and deliverables. The repository is popular partly because a named role is easy to understand: frontend specialist, product manager, marketing expert.

But a convincing persona does not tell a reviewer what authority changed when work moved between roles.

The UI needs a handoff card.

Request
  -> Role selected
  -> Evidence gathered
  -> Draft produced
  -> Handoff requested
  -> Human or next role accepts/rejects

Every transition should remain visible. Replacing one chat avatar with another is not sufficient.

A handoff card should answer:

Example:

from: frontend-specialist
to: accessibility-reviewer
reason: interaction implementation complete
evidence:
  - src/Dialog.tsx
  - test/dialog.keyboard.spec.ts
unresolved:
  - screen-reader announcement wording
authority_requested: review-only
base_revision: 81d09a2

The reviewer must be able to reject the handoff without losing prior evidence. A rejection should require a reason and return ownership to the prior role. If the underlying revision changes, mark the old handoff stale rather than silently refreshing it.

Give five participants the same multi-role task and ask them to predict the next tool effect before approving a handoff. Measure:

Stop the session if a participant approves an action they believe is read-only when it can mutate state. That is a design safety failure, not user error.

The handoff history needs a semantic ordered list, clear headings, keyboard-operable approve/reject controls, and status text that does not depend on agent color or avatar. Announce important state changes without streaming every intermediate thought.

This is a proposed interface and research protocol. I have not evaluated the repository's user interface or tested these personas with participants. Check the current README for actual installation and role definitions.

Specialization becomes useful when responsibility moves cleanly. A persona explains style; a handoff card explains accountability.

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