On 2 October someone opened an issue on Anthropic's tracker asking for a one-command way to hand a coding-agent session to a teammate (anthropics/claude-code#98937). Everyone working with agents knows it: you dig into something for an hour, the agent has all the context, and then someone else has to pick it up. Forwarding a chat log doesn't give their agent that context.
Six days later it shipped in Bellows 1.19.0. Here's what it does, and why we could move that fast.
Hand over: one file, any agent
Bellows is a free desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux that runs coding agents: Claude, Codex, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, any ACP agent, and local models.
In any session, Hand over saves one .bellows-session file:
- the whole conversation, with every tool call and its result;
- a handover the agent writes as you hand over: where things stand, what's next, what to watch out for;
- keys and passwords redacted before the file is written;
- a digest, so a file changed after it was made says so when it's opened.
Your teammate double-clicks it. Bellows shows who it's from and what it holds. They pick their own checkout of the repo and an agent, and choose Carry on. Their agent starts from your handover and the last exchanges, and the whole conversation is in their History.
And it doesn't have to be the same agent. You worked in Claude; they can carry on in Codex.
The rest of 1.19.0
Hand-over wasn't the only thing in the release:
- Review edits live. A Review pane shows each edit as a highlighted diff the moment the agent asks for it: proposed, then applied or not.
- Answer prompts from anywhere. Pair your phone once and every permission prompt from every session reaches it on any network, sealed end to end, to answer Allow once or Deny. The web console works too.
- Switch agents mid-task (1.17.0). Continue with… hands the task to another agent; the one you leave writes a handover and the project remembers.
Pairing, live
The feature that started all this is live sharing. Send a colleague a link to the session you're running. They watch from a browser, nothing to install. Each link carries one role: watch, suggest or type. Suggestions wait in a queue and reach the agent only when you accept them. It was asked for publicly too: anthropics/claude-code#60082 and openai/codex#46016.
Why it shipped in six days
We ship small and often: eight releases between 5 and 8 October. Tell us what you need and it goes to the top of the list.
Try Bellows, free, and tell us what you'd want next in the comments or on our issue tracker. We act fast on feedback.
Top comments (0)