handoff

A manual command for restoring or saving the current work session's context. It can read project notes and recent memory, or prepare approved decisions for storage before clearing the session.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review the current plan, findings, progress, and recent notes, or to record approved decisions in the project's memory and progress log.
Why use it?
It helps you regain your place after losing context and preserve important decisions without relying on automatic session events. Reading context never changes files; saving it requires approval.

Command for Codex

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/othmanadi/mddesign/handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/OthmanAdi/MDDesign

Made for: Codex.

Per session 28 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 389 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 $0.00028 $0.00389
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00195
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00078
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00039

Measured 2d ago against content hash ff0baa30d77c, 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 2d ago.

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.

.codex/commands/handoff.md · 45 lines

What it actually says

/mddesign:handoff

Manual session handoff operations.

Subcommands

/mddesign:handoff catchup (default)

Runs the SessionStart catchup logic now. Read-only.

  1. Read task_plan.md, findings.md, progress.md.
  2. Glob .agents/memory/scratch/**/*.md, read recent entries.
  3. Recall last WHY from MemPalace via /memory-router.
  4. Print a one-paragraph "where we are" preamble.
  5. Surface any nudges (missing DESIGN.md, missing planning files, missing memory router).

/mddesign:handoff promote

Runs the Stop promotion logic now. Useful before a planned /clear.

  1. Dispatch memory-keeper subagent to classify recent work.
  2. For each WHY candidate, HITL gate (named checkpoint: before_mempalace_write).
  3. On approval, memory-layer skill drives /memory-router save.
  4. Append ### Handoff <timestamp> to progress.md.

Usage examples

/mddesign:handoff                 # same as catchup
/mddesign:handoff catchup         # read planning + scratch + last WHY, print preamble
/mddesign:handoff promote         # pre-emptive stop promotion before /clear

Boundaries

  • catchup never writes.
  • promote writes only under HITL approval.
  • Never edits task_plan.md.

See skills/session-handoff/SKILL.md for full logic.

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. 2d ago First seen · 45 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A ff0baa30d77c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a command published in the GitHub repository OthmanAdi/MDDesign (13 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 389 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 2026-08-30.