handoff

handoff is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from aethrox/doctrine. It costs 72 tokens per session (794 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A fixed format for transferring unfinished work, an on-call shift, or an active incident to another person or agent. It organizes the handoff into situation, background, assessment, and recommendation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when changing ownership of live work, including incident response, on-call rotations, and tasks that are still in progress.
Why use it?
It prevents the next owner from having to reconstruct important context and reduces the chance that urgent details or next steps are lost.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the doctrine plugin — 33 skills shipped together

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 skills/aethrox/doctrine/handoff
Any agent
npx skills add aethrox/doctrine --skill handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aethrox/doctrine

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install doctrine, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 33 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for handoff

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aethrox/doctrine/handoff.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aethrox/doctrine/handoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aethrox/doctrine/handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aethrox/doctrine/handoff.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 794 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 $0.00072 $0.00794
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00397
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00159
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00079

Measured 5d ago against content hash 6af743fb425c, 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 5d 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.

skills/handoff/SKILL.md · 40 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 40 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Handoff

A handoff fails when the receiver has to reconstruct context the sender already had. This skill's defining constraint, from SBAR (Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation); the structured handoff standard behind the Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goal for handoff communication, adapted here from clinical and on-call practice: every handoff has exactly four parts, in that order, and nothing that belongs in one part gets buried inside another.

This covers handing off live, in-progress work between owners: an on-call shift, an open incident, or a task mid-flight. It is not the same job as compacting a conversation for a fresh agent session to resume (that's a session-continuity concern) or as writing a postmortem (that's incident-response's closed-incident artifact, written after the fact rather than mid-handoff).

Phase 1: Situation

State the current state in one or two lines: what's happening right now, headline only. A reader who stops after this line should still know whether this is urgent. Don't lead with history or analysis; the situation is the "what," not the "how we got here."

Phase 2: Background

Give only the context that changes what the receiver does next: what's already been tried, what's already been ruled out, what decisions are already made and shouldn't be re-litigated. A background section that restates everything from the start forces the receiver to re-derive what actually matters; the discipline here is inclusion by relevance, not by completeness. If something was tried and failed, say so explicitly; the single most expensive handoff failure is the receiver re-attempting a dead end because nobody mentioned it was already dead.

Phase 3: Assessment

State the current read of the problem, not just facts, but the sender's judgment: how serious is this, what's the actual root concern, what's still genuinely unknown versus just not yet written down. This is the part a bare status report skips, and it's the part that carries the most value, because it's the sender's accumulated judgment, not just a log of events.

Read the full file on GitHub · 40 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 5d ago First seen · 40 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 6af743fb425c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository aethrox/doctrine (18 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 794 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.

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