Show HN: Handoff is await human() for AI agents
Handoff is an open protocol designed to manage a single human decision for AI agents, ensuring the answer is delivered exactly once as typed data and authorizes one effect. The project is pre‑release, with a reference implementation running but no official hosted service, though a demo is available at handoff.omegas.dev. Conformance includes 26 Level 1 cases, while Level 2 continuation is not implemented.
- ▪The protocol mandates that a human answer be a single, typed response bound to a specific request, preventing reuse or replay.
- ▪Delivery mechanisms such as email or SMS are not part of the protocol and rely on external infrastructure.
- ▪The repository contains a Rust reference implementation, Python and TypeScript SDKs, and a conformance test suite, but many components remain unpublished or unbuilt.
- ▪A Level 1 conformance suite defines 26 test cases, with Level 2 continuation deliberately omitted from the current implementation.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | GitHub |
| Canonical URL | https://github.com/OmegaAgent/handoff |
| Publication time | Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:20:56 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-02T12:35:40.499Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-02T12:35:40.499Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | s895h1pnJ23Z · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Handoff An open protocol for the moment a program needs a person. Agents run continuously. The people who can unblock them do not, and those people are still the ones accountable for the decision. Handoff specifies what happens in between: how a request for a human decision is stated, how it reaches someone, how their answer comes back, and what record survives afterwards. The claim the whole design is built to support is deliberately narrow: One human answer, delivered to your agent exactly once, as typed data, authorizing exactly one effect. Every clause of that is load-bearing: One human answer. A specific person acted, and the record says who. Clearance is asserted by a human, never inferred from a side effect.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at GitHub.