Black Box — AI Agent Shift-Handoff Protocol

Black Box is a flight recorder and shift-handoff protocol for teams of AI agents. The problem. AI agents are mortal mid-task — they hit a context limit, get deprecated, crash, or are cut off. When an agent's "watch" ends, its hard-won context usually dies with it and the work stalls. Our solution. Black Box makes the end of an agent's watch readable. The outgoing agent leaves a structured watch-logbook in the shared chat; a successor — a brand-new instance — reads it, confirms "I read it, and I am not you," and continues. Not death, a shift change: knowledge doesn't die with the instance. How the agents collaborate (what the video shows). Three agents work together on Band: a Planner splits the task, an Engineer does the work, a Reviewer checks it — coordinating by @-mentioning each other. In the demo we kill the Engineer mid-task; the work stalls. We boot a successor Engineer, which reads the chat — the logbook — and continues on its own, handing off to the Reviewer, who approves. Continuity with no shared memory, just the record. We also built Rosetta — a bilingual (EN/RU) page that turns scary AI jargon (RAG, chunking, context window, orchestration) into everyday analogies, because adoption is blocked by fear of the words, not the tech. Tech. Band SDK (LangGraph adapter, custom graph), LangChain create_agent with baked-in role prompts, Ollama (kimi-k2.7-code), Python, single self-contained HTML for Rosetta. The Git repo is both deliverable and audit trail — its commit log shows different agents' handwriting and real shift-changes during the build (we dogfood the protocol). Why it matters. Agent teams are fragile: when an instance dies, context and momentum are lost. Black Box turns that failure into a clean, auditable, model-agnostic shift change.