An agent cannot be held accountable
So a human always owns every run. When something ships, a person's name is on it. By design, not by policy document.
The mechanism
The agent does the work. Your team keeps it honest.
This is the page for skeptics. Below: the pieces Handbell is built from, the three things your team does with it, and the rules we refuse to bend.
The pieces
Four things, no mystery
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
| Table | The shared workspace: a team's agents, runs, roles, and people in one live surface. If you're at the table, you see everything at the table. |
| Band | The people at a table. Each teammate holds specific permissions: deploys, billing, customer data. Everyone can see who holds what, at all times. |
| Run | One agent task, however long it takes. A run is live, needs a human, done, or failed. Progress is visible to the whole table while it happens. |
| Log | The run's activity record: every action, every tool call, every human intervention, attributed and timestamped. Not a debug view. The product. |
What your team does
Watch. Steer. Hand off.
Watch
Anyone at the table can drop into a live run, mid-flight, with full context: the plan, the progress so far, who's steering. And progress means progress. A run that's burning time without advancing shows as stalled, because that's the state you most need to see.
Steer
One person steers at a time. Anyone can comment; only the current owner redirects the agent, approves the risky step, or stops the run cleanly at a checkpoint. When two people disagree, the question is never who shouted last. It's who owns the run.
Hand off
Pass a run to a teammate, another timezone, or tomorrow morning. The outgoing owner passes, the incoming owner accepts, the log records it. Cross-timezone agent work stops depending on whoever happened to start the run.
The rules we won't bend
Accountability that holds
Reject is not undo
Declining agent work never touches your own undo history, and never silently reverts a teammate's. Agent history and human history stay separate.
Every action has a name on it
Redirects, approvals, hand-offs, stops: logged with a person and a timestamp. "The agent did it" is not an acceptable audit answer, so Handbell never gives you one.