handoff

A structured prompt that records the current conversation's context so another agent thread can continue the work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to hand off an unfinished task or share context with another agent, optionally highlighting specific concerns or a target project.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of losing decisions, relevant details, or instructions when switching repositories, threads, or agents.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,793 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 $0.00031 $0.03793
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.01896
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00759
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00379

Measured 2d ago against content hash e3c637a5fade, 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 2d 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.

agents/skills/handoff/SKILL.md · 207 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 207 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Context Handoff

Generate a structured prompt capturing the current conversation context so it can be pasted into another agent thread.

Arguments

  • $ARGUMENTS - Optional. Free-form instructions about what to emphasize or who the target is. May also specify the target Argus project the follow-up task is created in, two ways:
    • project=<name> — explicit override, recognized only as a standalone whitespace-delimited token (so the word "project" in a sentence is not parsed as a directive). Used verbatim and takes precedence over any cue-anchored target. It is intentionally not validated against the projects list: the explicit project= syntax signals deliberate intent, so the user's literal value is honored.
    • A cue-anchored target: the first whitespace-delimited token after to, for, hand off to, or handoff to — for example /handoff to keystone this task or /handoff this work to keystone. Compare that token (lowercased, with surrounding punctuation stripped) against the Argus projects listed in the Context block. A token is treated as the target only when it matches a known project; the routing phrase is then ignored when assembling the emphasis content. If several cue phrases appear, the first one whose token matches a known project wins. A cue-anchored token that matches no known project is never silently used — the skill asks (see step 8). Because to/for are common words, this validation is what prevents ordinary prose (e.g. "focus on the api changes", "remember to test") from being mistaken for routing: prose only routes if a word right after a cue happens to name a real project, and even then the handoff body is shown for review before any task is created.
    • If no project is specified either way, derive from the worktree path: the immediate subdirectory after ~/.argus/worktrees/ (e.g. CWD /Users/me/.argus/worktrees/dots/foo → project dots). If that does not resolve, ask the user before creating the task.
    • no-task — standalone token that skips Argus task creation entirely (KB save still runs). When present it short-circuits step 8 before any project resolution, so a cue-anchored or project= target is moot and the skill does not ask about an unknown project.

Read the full file on GitHub · 207 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. 2d ago First seen · 207 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A e3c637a5fade

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository drn/dots (23 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 3,793 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.