handback

handback is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from broomva/skills. It costs 275 tokens per session (3,670 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A format for handing unfinished work back to a person as a clear work order. It states what the person must do and gives a default action when silence is acceptable.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when work cannot continue without human action, especially to describe the remaining task, its blocker, and any safe default.
Why use it?
It prevents an autonomous coding session from ending with a vague blocker or an unclear request for help.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 handback

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/broomva/skills/handback.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/broomva/skills/handback)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/broomva/skills/handback"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/broomva/skills/handback.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 275 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,670 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 $0.00275 $0.03670
Opus 5 $0.00138 $0.01835
Sonnet 5 $0.00055 $0.00734
Haiku 4.5 $0.00028 $0.00367

Measured 4d ago against content hash a2c96ae7ca67, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

handback 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/orchestration/handback/SKILL.md · 230 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 230 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

handback — end an arc with a work order, not a lab notebook

Spec: broomva/workspacedocs/specs/2026-08-18-agent-handback-contract.html (BRO-2179).

Why this skill exists

Measured over 994 Claude Code transcripts (analysis set: 100 sessions of ≥6h wall-clock and ≥150 assistant turns):

Long arcs whose final message mentions a blocker at all 31 / 100
Long arcs halting on a human (terminal-stance phrasing) 18 / 100
…of those 18, containing a conforming ask block 0 / 18
…containing an imperative anywhere in the message 3 / 18
…containing any ? at all 13%
…with the question next to the blocker it describes 6%
Stating a default if the human stays silent 5% of all 100
Ever emitting a push notification 0 / 100
Blockers knowable before the arc started 81%

The two blocker rows differ on purpose. The broad count (31) includes messages that merely mention being blocked — "the pre-commit hook blocked it", "#381 remains blocked by the hang". The narrow count (18) is the defensible one: a terminal message that stops the arc on a person. The enforcement gate keys on the narrow definition, because refusing a healthy receipt that happens to contain the word "blocked" would fight the operator.

The ask usually exists. It is placed last, written in the indicative ("Not merged — auto-merge correctly blocked"), and carries no default, so the arc dies on it — median 2.4h of stalled arc-time behind such a message, 25 of them overnight-length.

Rule zero — asking is the last resort, not the interface

No ask may exist until every rung below has been tried and recorded. A row with an empty exhausted list is a defect, not a question.

Rung Try this
1 · Read Is the answer already on disk — ticket history, prior conversations, the knowledge graph, the handoff doc, the code? Most "decisions" are recoverable, not new
2 · Standing grant Has this exact question been answered before? Check .control/preauth.yaml Re-asking a settled question is the cheapest failure to eliminate
3 · Delegate Can a fresh agent resolve it — a reader, a researcher, an adversarial reviewer with different context? Chain agents instead of chaining to the human
4 · Reroute Can another lane, worktree, fan-out, or approach go around it? The blocker is often a path, not a wall
5 · Loop Can iteration resolve it — retry under a changed assumption, let a persist loop converge? Slow beats blocked when nobody is awake
6 · Default Is the choice reversible? Take it, log it, tell the human afterwards. Do not ask. — "log it" means an entry in the ledger's decisions:, and "tell the human" means the 🔀 block below Reversible decisions are not the human's to make in real time
7 · Ask Only now. Record which rungs were tried and why each failed.

Read the full file on GitHub · 230 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. 4d ago First seen · 230 lines · 275 tokens per session scan A a2c96ae7ca67

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handback is a skill published in the GitHub repository broomva/skills (3 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 275 tokens to every session and 3,670 once invoked, about $0.0014 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 2026-08-31.

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