kestral-handoff

kestral-handoff is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Kestral-Team/kestral-plugins. It costs 108 tokens per session (1,989 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A work-session handoff tool for projects tracked in Kestral, a shared system for plans and task status.

In plain words
What is it for?
Closing a Kestral-tracked work session, updating its plan and task statuses, or preparing to switch worktrees.
Why use it?
It records what changed in the current worktree so another coding session can continue without relying on chat history. It also updates the shared plan and leaves a continuation pointer.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex; $skill-name invocation.

Part of the kestral plugin — 9 skills shipped together

Good fit Closing a Kestral-tracked work session, updating its plan and task statuses, or preparing to switch worktrees.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kestral-team/kestral-plugins/kestral-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 Kestral-Team/kestral-plugins --skill kestral-handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Kestral-Team/kestral-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install kestral, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills.

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 kestral-handoff

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kestral-team/kestral-plugins/kestral-handoff/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kestral-team/kestral-plugins/kestral-handoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kestral-team/kestral-plugins/kestral-handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kestral-team/kestral-plugins/kestral-handoff/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for kestral-handoff

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kestral-team/kestral-plugins/kestral-handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kestral-team/kestral-plugins/kestral-handoff.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 108 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,989 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.
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 $0.00108 $0.01989
Opus 5 $0.00054 $0.00994
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00398
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00199

Measured 10d ago against content hash 9c4f27b9c324, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

kestral-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 10d 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.

plugins/kestral/skills/kestral-handoff/SKILL.md · 140 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 140 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Kestral Handoff

This skill makes Kestral the durable handoff: it reconciles what moved against the shared plan document, repushes the plan + task state to Kestral, and points the next clean chat at it. Because the state lives in Kestral (not this conversation), the next session can be a different agent in a different git worktree. Counterpart to multiphase-plan (creates the plan) and kestral-pickup (resumes it).

Prerequisites

The Kestral MCP server must be in this session (/mcp). Authentication is handled by the MCP connection — proceed directly. If any call returns auth failure (401, unauthorized, or Not authenticated), ask the user to reconnect or authenticate the Kestral MCP server through their app's UI (Cowork: Customize → Connectors; Codex: authenticate then start a new thread using /new — CLI: codex mcp login Kestral; app: Plugins → Kestral → MCP servers gear; Claude Code: /mcp → reconnect; Cursor: Settings → Tools & MCPs → Connect).

Human-readable references

Keep Kestral IDs internal unless the user asks for them. In user-facing output:

  • Tasks: show slug - title when a slug is available, linked with url when the host can render links.
  • Projects, documents, and other Kestral entities: show the readable name first, linked with url when possible.
  • People: show display names; if unresolved, write Unknown member (id: <rawId>).

Entrypoint

Expected invocations include:

  • /kestral:handoff
  • $kestral-handoff
  • "Hand this off — sync the plan back to Kestral."
  • "Repush the multi-phase plan before I switch worktrees."

Canonical plan format

Edit the plan using the canonical format.

  • MCP workflow: use context.plan_format from this response — do not try to read a local file.
  • Plugin skill on disk: if context.plan_format is absent, read ../multiphase-plan/references/plan-format.md.

If context.statuses is present, map generic status terms to those workspace keys. Otherwise call list_statuses (or delegate to kestral-sync, which owns status discovery).

Read the full file on GitHub · 140 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. 10d ago First seen · 140 lines · 108 tokens per session scan A 9c4f27b9c324

Subscribe to this mod's changes

kestral-handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository Kestral-Team/kestral-plugins (4 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 108 tokens to every session and 1,989 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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