handoff

A short factual record of an agent session that another session can read. It records the goal, completed outputs, exact evidence paths, unresolved risks, and optional continuation text.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to record what was completed, where the supporting files are, and what remains uncertain. The record is saved at a caller-provided location or under .agents/ao/handoff/.
Why use it?
It lets the next session work from verifiable files and facts instead of relying on memory. It does not choose the next task, assign ownership, change Git or tracker state, or declare work finished without evidence.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agentops plugin — 51 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook 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/boshu2/agentops/handoff
Any agent
npx skills add boshu2/agentops --skill handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/boshu2/agentops

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agentops, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 51 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook.

Per session 28 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 629 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 $0.00629
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00315
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00126
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00063

Measured 3d ago against content hash 8328461f6b0b, 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 3d 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.

images/gemini/skills/handoff/SKILL.md · 71 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 71 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Handoff

A handoff works because the next context can act on exact paths and facts without trusting the author's memory; any line the reader cannot verify from the artifact itself is decoration, not handoff.

Write a factual session artifact that another context can read. Include:

  • caller-supplied goal and summary;
  • completed artifacts and exact evidence paths;
  • unresolved facts or risks;
  • optional caller-supplied continuation text;
  • best-effort read-only repository identity when useful.

Do not infer a next action, select work, assign ownership, consume the artifact, change tracker or Git state, classify a verdict, govern retries, or restart a runtime. Reading a handoff must not mutate it.

Named failure mode — optimistic closure: writing "done" for work whose evidence path does not exist, so the next context builds on a phantom.

Anti-pattern: narrating the session chronologically ("first I tried…, then…"). Corrective: record end-state facts — artifacts, paths, unresolved risks — and drop the journey.

Write the artifact to the caller-owned handoff location when the caller names one; otherwise it is explicit requested proof under .agents/ao/handoff/. There is no permanent generic handoff store — an artifact nobody consumes is scratch, not evidence.

The ao session handoff and ao session rehydrate commands implement the same boundary for JSON artifacts under .agents/ao/handoff/. The skill may write Markdown when that better serves a human, but the content semantics remain identical.

Earlier default compatibility

JSON artifacts already stored under .agents/handoff/ remain read-only evidence. ao session handoff writes new JSON to .agents/ao/handoff/, while ao session rehydrate searches both directories and selects the newest lexical handoff id; if an identical filename exists in both, the canonical .agents/ao/handoff/ copy wins. No command moves or deletes the legacy files. Human-authored Markdown consumers receive the exact path, so they do not need to scan either default. This owning skill contract is the compatibility authority; no separate migration artifact is required.

Read the full file on GitHub · 71 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. 3d ago First seen · 71 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A 8328461f6b0b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository boshu2/agentops (431 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 629 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.

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