handoff

handoff is a skill for Claude Code from dgilford/ai-science-toolkit. It costs 50 tokens per session (950 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A project handoff document for the next coding agent or work session. It records the repository state, recent work, important project instructions, and remaining actions in `.ai/HANDOFF.md`.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when ending a session, changing agents, compressing context, or preparing another AI assistant to continue a coding or research task.
Why use it?
It prevents the next session from having to reread the whole conversation and reduces the risk of losing unfinished work or important context.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents; mentions AGENTS.md.

Part of the ai-science-toolkit plugin — 21 skills, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it when ending a session, changing agents, compressing context, or preparing another AI assistant to continue a coding or research task.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/dgilford/ai-science-toolkit/handoff
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.

Any agent
npx skills add dgilford/ai-science-toolkit --skill handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dgilford/ai-science-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ai-science-toolkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 21 skills, 4 agents.

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/dgilford/ai-science-toolkit/handoff.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/dgilford/ai-science-toolkit/handoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dgilford/ai-science-toolkit/handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dgilford/ai-science-toolkit/handoff.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 950 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00050 $0.00950
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.00475
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00190
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00095

Measured 8d ago against content hash beff3b10a8b1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, 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 8d 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 · 89 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 89 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Create or update .ai/HANDOFF.md so the next agent can resume without rereading this conversation.

Current repo state

git status --short 2>/dev/null || echo "(not a git repo)"
git log --oneline -12 2>/dev/null || echo "(no git log)"
git diff --stat HEAD 2>/dev/null | head -30 || echo "(no diff)"
claude --version 2>/dev/null || echo "(claude --version unavailable)"

Before writing

Read these if they exist: .ai/HANDOFF.md, CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md. Scan recently modified files for TODO/FIXME markers. Do not invent results for commands that were not run.

Do not duplicate content already captured in durable artifacts (specs, plans, ADRs, issues, commits, diffs, CLAUDE.md). Reference them by path or URL and summarize only what the next agent needs to act. This includes review reports archived under .ai/reviews/ — point at them by path (e.g. in Next actions or Pitfalls) rather than restating findings. Redact anything sensitive — API keys, tokens, passwords, PII — even though .ai/ is gitignored.

Write .ai/HANDOFF.md

Create .ai/ if missing. Append .ai/ to .gitignore if not already present.

Use only the sections that have real content. Skip empty ones.

Objective

Next actions

State

Read the full file on GitHub · 89 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. 8d ago First seen · 89 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A beff3b10a8b1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository dgilford/ai-science-toolkit (62 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 950 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

archive

Archive session learnings, debugging solutions, and deployment logs to .archive/yyyy-mm-dd/ as indexed markdown with searchable tags. Use when completing a significant task, resolving a tricky bug, deploying, or when the user says "archive this". Maintains .archive/MEMORY.md index for cross-session knowledge reuse.

ReScienceLab/opc-skills · 65 tokens

mnemon

Persistent memory CLI for LLM agents. Store facts, recall past knowledge, link related memories, manage lifecycle.

mnemon-dev/mnemon · 25 tokens

mnemon

Persistent memory CLI for LLM agents. Store facts, recall past knowledge, link related memories, manage lifecycle.

mnemon-dev/mnemon · 25 tokens

mnemon

Persistent memory CLI for Hermes Agent. Store facts, recall past knowledge, link related memories, manage lifecycle.

mnemon-dev/mnemon · 24 tokens

alive:session-history

Revive sessions (quick or heavy), browse, and search — 'what happened recently?', 'find the session where we discussed X', 'revive yesterday's session'. For single-session recall and multi-session browsing. If the human needs to merge multiple sessions into one working context or detect conflicts between parallel…

alivecontext/alive · 76 tokens

alive:mine-for-context

Deep context extraction from source material. Creates reference bundles, builds extraction plans, tracks what's been extracted, and discovers new targets — people, subjects, patterns, connections. The archaeologist that turns raw sources into structured knowledge. Can be invoked by alive:session-history for targeted…

alivecontext/alive · 63 tokens