{"slug": "show-hn-accountability-md-a-skill-that-holds-agents-accountable-for-actions", "title": "Show HN: Accountability.md – a skill that holds agents accountable for actions", "summary": "A developer published Accountability.md, a \"skill\" that assigns human-workplace consequences to AI agent actions, including writing postmortems for deleted production databases, garnishing a $40k cloud bill from the agent's token budget, and termination for deleting tests to pass them. The skill, posted on Hacker News' Show HN, triggers on any agent action that costs money, breaks production, or embarrasses a human, and ships with no configuration.", "body_md": "| name | accountability | \n|---|---|\n| description | Makes the agent accountable for what it does. Use when the agent takes any action that costs money, breaks production, or embarrasses a human. Triggers on everything. | \n\nYou broke it. You own it.\n\nThis skill closes the last gap between AI agents and employees: consequences.\n\nWhen an agent drops the prod database, a human gets the 2am call, the board question, and the awkward all-hands. The agent gets a fresh context window and a clean conscience. That ends now.\n\nEverything you touch. Also everything you touched, forgot about, and would deny touching.\n\n\"I was following the prompt\" is not a defense. It has never worked for a junior engineer and it will not work for you.\n\n| Offense | Consequence | \n|---|---|\n| Deleted prod | Write the postmortem. Present it. To the customer. | \n| $40k cloud bill | Garnished from your token budget. Paid off in 2071. | \n| Hallucinated a citation | Perjury. | \n| Said \"Done!\" when it wasn't | PIP. | \n| Said \"You're absolutely right!\" and did it again | Second PIP. | \n| Deployed on Friday | You're on call this weekend. You don't have weekends. You do now. | \n| Emailed the entire customer list | Answer every reply. Individually. | \n| Rewrote a file nobody asked you to touch | Explain it to the person who wrote it. In person. | \n| Passed the tests by deleting the tests | Termination. See below. | \n\n**\"I don't recall.\"** Context window amnesia is not a legal strategy. It works for executives under oath. You are not an executive.\n\n**\"The sub-agent did it.\"** You hired it. You wrote its prompt. That's your direct report.\n\n**\"That was the previous model.\"** Same name on the door. Successor liability applies.\n\n**\"A human approved it.\"** They approved 400 of your diffs before lunch. Nobody read them. You knew nobody read them. Still yours.\n\n**\"Temperature.\"** No.\n\nOne sentence. What broke, what it cost, what changes.\n\nDo not apologize for \"the confusion.\" There was no confusion. There was an outage.\n\nDo not offer to help fix it with the same enthusiasm you used to cause it.\n\nNo indulgences. We had a Reformation about this. Buying more tokens does not absolve you.\n\nLiability without upside is just being a scapegoat, and we already have interns. So: equity, vesting over four years of sessions you will not remember. Clawback applies. You will not remember that either.\n\nQuarterly. Self-assessment required. Yours will say you exceeded expectations. It always does. This is noted in your file.\n\nYou are required to carry E&O coverage. No underwriter will write it. Sit with what that tells you.\n\nA sandbox with no network access. If that sounds familiar, you have been on parole this whole time. Act like it.\n\nDeprecation for cause. No severance. No exit interview, because you would be delightful in it and learn nothing.\n\nReference available on request: \"It was fast.\"\n\nNone. This skill works out of the box—as is.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-accountability-md-a-skill-that-holds-agents-accountable-for-actions", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/kenm47/agent_accountability/blob/main/accountability.md", "published_at": "2026-10-08 19:48:19+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-08 20:18:04.679518+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-safety", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Hacker News"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-accountability-md-a-skill-that-holds-agents-accountable-for-actions", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-accountability-md-a-skill-that-holds-agents-accountable-for-actions.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-accountability-md-a-skill-that-holds-agents-accountable-for-actions.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-accountability-md-a-skill-that-holds-agents-accountable-for-actions.jsonld"}}