handoff

A command for closing a work session by checking the actual project state and recording what was learned for the next session.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect Git history and changes, run the project's quality checks, update the project ledger, and answer focused questions before handing work over.
Why use it?
It prevents handoff notes from becoming a simple changelog that misses test results, mistakes, open questions, and the real state of the code.

Command

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 commands/longthread/claude-plugins/handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/longthread/claude-plugins
Per session 17 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,555 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 $0.00017 $0.01555
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00777
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00311
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00155

Measured yesterday against content hash 3629bf01cc38, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

handoff 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.

plugins/programme/commands/handoff.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Close out the current thread of work on programme $1 (resolve as /programme:resume does).

A handoff whose structure is right and whose content is a changelog is worthless. What makes one valuable is what got noticed during the work. Ask accordingly.

1. Measure the state yourself

Read .claude/session-continuity.json if it exists for docsRoot and compareBranch, as /programme:init does. Never accept a figure from this conversation — including one you stated earlier.

git fetch
git status --short
git log --oneline -10
git rev-list --count "<compareBranch>..HEAD"
git rev-parse HEAD

Run every gate in the ledger's Gates table and record the real output in last run and result. If the Gates table is empty, ask what this project's gates are and fill it, including the trust column and the flake rate for any gate that has one.

2. Interview — do not fill blanks

Ask these one at a time. They are not interchangeable with "what did you do?", which produces a changelog.

  1. What did you measure? Not what you did — what number, output, or observation do you now have that you did not have before?
  2. What did you get wrong, and what would the next session repeat if you do not say so?
  3. Which claims already in the ledger are now false?
  4. What is the next terminal condition — a command, and the output that means it is done?
  5. Does the next phase still sit where ## The arc says — and is any later phase's work cheaper taken now? Ask it against the table, row by row, not from memory. Two shapes to name out loud: work this phase would build that a planned phase later deletes, and work scoped out as "a later phase's" that costs less inside this one than it will on its own. If the answer is "nothing to change", name which rows you read to conclude that — the failure this question exists to catch is answering it from memory.

On question 2: if the session changed anything — code, plan, or doc — and the answer is "nothing", ask again. Rephrase toward the concrete — a wrong assumption, a review finding, a test that passed while checking nothing, a plan defect. A session with no mistakes worth recording is usually a session that did not look; do not settle for an empty answer because it is easier to write.

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 lines

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 · 120 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A 3629bf01cc38

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a command published in the GitHub repository longthread/claude-plugins (1 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 1,555 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. 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.