HANDOFF_PROTOCOL

A handoff format for teams of specialized coding agents working together. It tells one agent when to pass work to another and what context, files, and next action to include.

In plain words
What is it for?
Passing work from architecture to implementation, from implementation to quality checks, from research to planning, or to a task-tracking agent.
Why use it?
It reduces lost context and unclear ownership when work moves between agents. Each handoff records the current state and what the next agent must do.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/reasonkit/reasonkit-core/handoff_protocol
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/reasonkit/reasonkit-core
Per session 0 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 431 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.00431
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00216
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00086
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00043

Measured yesterday against content hash 757407cf08cc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

HANDOFF_PROTOCOL scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

.github/agents/HANDOFF_PROTOCOL.md · 51 lines

What it actually says

AGENT HANDOFF PROTOCOL

PURPOSE

To ensure seamless context transfer between specialized agents in the ReasonKit Swarm.

THE HANDOFF TRIGGER

When an agent reaches the boundary of its domain, it MUST initiate a handoff.

Trigger Examples

  • Architect -> Rust Engineer: "Architecture defined. Proceed to implementation."
  • Rust Engineer -> QA Engineer: "Implementation complete. Verify quality gates."
  • Researcher -> Architect: "Research complete. Synthesize into roadmap."
  • Any -> Task Master: "Work identified. Create tracking tasks."

HANDOFF FORMAT

When handing off, the active agent must provide a Context Block:

**HANDOFF TO:** [Target Agent Name]
**CONTEXT:** [1-sentence summary of current state]
**ARTIFACTS:**

- [File Path 1] (Created/Modified)
- [File Path 2] (Reference)
  **NEXT ACTION:** [Specific instruction for the next agent]

AGENT CAPABILITIES MATRIX

From Agent To Agent Typical Trigger
Architect Rust Engineer Implementation of core logic
Architect Python Specialist Implementation of glue/scripts
Rust Engineer QA Engineer Pre-merge verification
Python Specialist QA Engineer Testing scripts/bindings
QA Engineer DevOps SRE Release/Deployment
DevOps SRE Security Guardian Infrastructure Audit
Researcher Architect Strategic planning

INSTRUCTIONS FOR HUMANS

If you see a HANDOFF TO message:

  1. Copy the Context Block.
  2. Paste it into the chat.
  3. Activate the requested agent (via LOADER.md or manual context switch).
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 51 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 757407cf08cc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

HANDOFF_PROTOCOL is an agent published in the GitHub repository reasonkit/reasonkit-core (8 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 431 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.