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.

msitarzewski/agency-agents https://github.com/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. php 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.