mise-handoff

Context is a budget, and this is the hand-off that beats silent auto-compaction. Capture the current state so a fresh session resumes with no loss, then stop, rather than pushing into compaction where fidelity quietly dies.

Write these six fields, tight and specific (focus: $ARGUMENTS if given):

• Goal — what we're actually trying to accomplish (the outcome, not the next keystroke).
• Done — what's finished and verified, with the evidence (a passing test, a running screen). Re-verify it now, live — rerun the test, reload the screen — don't transcribe an earlier claim (yours, a notes file's, a teammate's) on trust. If you can't re-verify something before the hand-off, write it as unverified rather than done; a stale "done" is worse than an honest gap, because the next session builds on top of it without rechecking.
• Next — the very next concrete step, then the ones after it.
• Key decisions — choices made and why, so they aren't relitigated or accidentally undone.
• Files touched — the files that matter and what changed in each; flag anything half-done.
• Gotchas — traps, dead ends, environment quirks, "don't do X, it breaks Y."

Pick the durable target, most-programmatic first:

• Check .mise/state.json for a tracker the project was set up with. If it names a platform other than GitHub Issues (Jira, Linear, Asana, Trello, etc.) and it's reachable this session (MCP/API/CLI), write the hand-off there — a task or comment tagged handoff — so it lives where the rest of the project's work already does.
• Otherwise, if gh is authenticated and the repo has a remote, open a GitHub issue (gh issue create) — it's shared, linkable, and survives the machine. Label it handoff.
• Otherwise write HANDOFF.md at the repo root. If you commit it, honor any no-auto-commit rule: ask first, then run the commit yourself on a yes — don't hand over a command to type.
• Never leave the hand-off only in chat; chat is the thing about to be lost.

Then give the user a ready-to-paste resume prompt, not just a pointer to the artifact. Put it in its own fenced code block, on one line, so it can be copied with a single click and dropped straight into a fresh session as the next /mise-cook (or plain) prompt — e.g.:

Resume from issue #190: <one-line goal>. Read the issue for full context, then continue from "Next".

Don't make the reader assemble this themselves from prose — the whole point of the hand-off is that a fresh session (or a fresh reader) can go from "here's the artifact" to "working again" without hand-crafting anything. Keep the hand-off itself scannable — a fresh reader should grasp the state in under a minute, not wade through a transcript.