handoff

handoff is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ariaxhan/kernel-claude. It costs 38 tokens per session (1,197 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A handoff format and workflow for saving the important state of a coding session, including decisions, phases, context rules, and next steps.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when pausing work, changing context, or handing a task to another session so progress and precise file references are preserved.
Why use it?
It prevents the next session from having to reconstruct the work from a long conversation and makes it clear what information should be loaded.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Installs and runs on its own, but its text points at files inside its plugin — anything it tells you to read at a ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} path is only there once the plugin is installed. Installing the plugin gets both.

Part of the kernel plugin — 28 skills, 13 agents, 9 hooks 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/ariaxhan/kernel-claude/handoff
Any agent
npx skills add ariaxhan/kernel-claude --skill handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ariaxhan/kernel-claude

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install kernel, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 13 agents, 9 hooks.

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/ariaxhan/kernel-claude/handoff.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ariaxhan/kernel-claude/handoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ariaxhan/kernel-claude/handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ariaxhan/kernel-claude/handoff.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,197 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 $0.00038 $0.01197
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00598
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00239
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00120

Measured 4d ago against content hash 153570d3e6a4, 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 4d 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 · 119 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 119 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Why manifest-first + bounded (EXP-L21): what a decision needs is flat (~50-70k tokens) regardless of session length; the accumulating transcript is almost pure decoration by late session. A handoff that says "read the conversation" recreates the waste. A handoff that pins exact selectors + phases lets the next session reconstruct ONLY the load-bearing state.

Reference: skills/context-mgmt/SKILL.md

<on_start>

agentdb read-start

</on_start>

<ask_user> Use AskUserQuestion when: state extraction complete, before writing the manifest Ask: "Anything to add to the handoff? Blockers, decisions, or context I might have missed?" Options: looks complete, add context, skip handoff </ask_user>

Context section — the attention budget is the design center:

  • policy.mode: advisory (default) | bounded (extra loads must be justified + ledgered) | sealed (forbidden globs hook-blocked; for controlled experiments)
  • required: SELECTORS, not whole files, wherever a section suffices: {path, heading: "## X"} · {path, lines: "A-B"} · {path, grep: "pat", context: N} · {git_diff: "revA..revB"} — each with a reason
  • forbidden: globs the resume must NOT touch (sealed mode enforces via guard-context hook)
  • budget: target_tokens (aim: boot + manifest + 2-12k selected history, per EXP-L21), max_tokens (hard stop)

Execution section: entry_phase, entrypoint (the literal first operation), stop_conditions, checkpoints (when to emit kernel.checkpoint/v1 during the resumed work).

Resume section: one-line continuation prompt: /kernel:ingest resume from _meta/handoffs/{file}.json

JSON strings are always quoted, so sha/commit fields cannot type-drift (the old YAML fails validation).

Read the full file on GitHub · 119 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. 4d ago First seen · 119 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A 153570d3e6a4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository ariaxhan/kernel-claude (12 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 1,197 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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