handoff

Hand off work that another actor can continue

Create the smallest complete continuation record. The next human or agent should be able to identify the goal, trust the evidence, and take one useful action without receiving the original chat.

This skill works locally. Handover MCP or the handover-sh CLI adds shared, versioned publishing when it is available; never make installation a prerequisite for creating a useful handoff.

Choose create or resume

• Create when the current actor is stopping, changing models, approaching a context limit, or transferring ownership.
• Resume when the user provides HANDOFF.md, a Handover link, a handover slug, or another continuation record.
• If the request needs strict machine-readable JSON, schema validation, or protocol exchange, use the companion handover-record skill.

Inspect the source of truth

Before writing, inspect the current task, relevant files, version-control status and diff, linked issue or pull request, test output, and any existing handoff. Prefer original artifacts over remembered summaries. Update an existing canonical handoff instead of creating a duplicate.

Do not invent missing state. Label it Unverified or make it an open question. Keep credentials, secrets, tokens, private keys, copied sessions, hidden reasoning, and unnecessary personal data out of every artifact.

Create the local record

Use the path requested by the user. Otherwise update an existing handoff or write HANDOFF.md at the project root when the record should travel with the project.

# Handoff

## Goal
The intended outcome and acceptance criteria.

## Current state
- Complete:
- In progress:
- Blocked:
- Unverified:

## Decisions
- Decision, reason, and consequence.

## Evidence
- File, URL, command result, test, revision, or other original artifact.

## Next action
The smallest useful next step, with an owner when known.

## Open risks and questions
- Anything that could change the next action.

## Relevant artifacts
- Exact paths or links the next actor should inspect.