handoff

handoff is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from int2t05/engineering-skills. It costs 49 tokens per session (655 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured handoff note for transferring unfinished work to another coding session or agent. It records the goal, decisions, current state, rejected approaches, and next steps without including secrets or personal information.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when ending a session, switching agents, or passing work to someone else who needs clear instructions to continue.
Why use it?
It prevents the next person or session from having to reconstruct the work from the beginning.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the engineering-skills plugin — 48 skills, 1 agent, 1 hook shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add int2t05/engineering-skills
Claude Code
/plugin install engineering-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install engineering-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 48 skills, 1 agent, 1 hook.

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/int2t05/engineering-skills/handoff.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/int2t05/engineering-skills/handoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/int2t05/engineering-skills/handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/int2t05/engineering-skills/handoff.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 655 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 5.1 $0.00049 $0.00655
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00328
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00131
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00065

Measured 5d ago against content hash 806c1fb4d838, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, 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 5d 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/09-operate/handoff/SKILL.md · 39 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 39 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Handoff

Write a handoff brief summarizing the current conversation so a fresh agent can continue the work immediately. The brief is the only context the next session starts with — make it sufficient.

When to use

  • The current session is ending and another agent (or a future you) will continue the work.
  • Switching between foreground and background agents mid-task.

Not for: continuing work in the same session — just keep going; summarizing work that's already captured in specs/plans/ADRs — reference those by path instead.

Steps

  1. Summarize context and decisions. Capture the goal, what was decided and why, what was tried and rejected, and the current state. Don't restate what's already in artifacts — reference specs, plans, ADRs, issues, commits, and diffs by path or URL.
  2. List concrete next steps. Numbered, each independently actionable, starting from exactly where the work stopped.
  3. Suggest skills. Add a "Suggested skills" section naming the skills the next agent should invoke (e.g. tdd, code-review).
  4. Redact sensitive information. API keys, passwords, and PII must not appear in the brief — it may become a background agent's prompt or a shared file.
  5. Tailor to the next focus. If the user passed an argument describing what the next session is for, weight the brief toward that focus.
  6. Deliver. Save the brief to the OS temporary directory (not the current workspace), or launch a background agent seeded with it: claude --bg --name "<descriptive name>" "<brief>". Always pass --name with a descriptive title (e.g. "Fix login bug") — it sets the display name in the job list, session picker, and terminal title. The launched agent starts in the current working directory and returns immediately; manage it with claude agents.

Verify

  • A fresh agent given only the brief could continue the work without asking "what's the state?"
  • Next steps are concrete and start from where work stopped
  • No content duplicated from existing artifacts (referenced by path/URL instead)
  • No secrets, tokens, or PII in the brief
  • Brief saved to the temp dir, or a named background agent launched with it

Read the full file on GitHub · 39 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files 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. 5d ago First seen · 39 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 806c1fb4d838

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository int2t05/engineering-skills (3 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 655 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 2026-08-31.