Handoff

Handoff

Overview

A handoff is a self-contained context package that lets a different person — or a fresh AI agent — pick up in-progress work without re-deriving everything. Most delegation fails not because the next person lacks skill, but because the context in the originator's head never got written down: what's done, what's half-done, why a path was abandoned, and what to do next. This skill produces a structured handoff document that captures exactly that, so the receiver can be productive on their first action instead of their tenth.

Use it across any domain in this library — engineering work, a PM initiative, a compliance audit, a draft document — wherever work outlives a single working session.

Use when

• Switching off a task — you started something and someone else (or future-you) will finish it.
• Delegating to an agent — handing a scoped task to a sub-agent or teammate who lacks your conversation history.
• End of a session/shift — async teams where the next person picks up cold.
• Escalating — passing a blocked item up or sideways with full context on what was tried.

Clarify First

Before writing the handoff, confirm these inputs. If any is unknown or vague, ASK — do not assume:

• Receiver — a teammate, a fresh AI agent, or future-you (sets how much background to spell out vs assume)
• The goal + done-state — what "finished" looks like for this work (anchors the Next Steps section)
• Current state — what is done, in-progress, and untouched right now (the heart of the handoff)
• Constraints & landmines — deadlines, decisions already made, paths already tried and abandoned (prevents the receiver repeating dead ends)

Stop rule: ask only the 2-3 that most change the output. If the user says "just draft it," proceed and list your assumptions at the top of the handoff.

Quick Start

# Gather objective state (git branch, recent commits, changed/untracked files) to seed the handoff
python scripts/handoff_context.py --repo . --format markdown