handoff

handoff is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ljchang/mecha. It costs 75 tokens per session (2,358 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A session-closing workflow for updating HANDOFF.md and HISTORY.md documentation. HANDOFF.md records what remains, while HISTORY.md records work that has actually shipped.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after a session changes behavior, before handing work to another developer, or when handoff documentation no longer matches the project.
Why use it?
It prevents stale handoff notes from making completed work look unfinished or causing someone to rebuild it. Changes are checked against the source code rather than commit messages.

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

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 handoff

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ljchang/mecha/handoff.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ljchang/mecha/handoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ljchang/mecha/handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ljchang/mecha/handoff.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 75 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,358 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00075 $0.02358
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.01179
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00472
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00236

Measured 4d ago against content hash 1a7a618b0126, 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 1 finding 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -s localhost:8080/props | jq '{total_slots, n_ctx: .default_generation_settings.n_ctx, vision: .modalities.vision}'
.claude/skills/handoff/SKILL.md · 224 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 224 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Closing out a session

docs/HANDOFF.md is the file someone reads before deciding what to build next. That makes staleness worse than absence: a to-do list that mixes shipped work with open work sends the reader to re-implement something that already exists, or to skip something that does not.

This skill keeps that from happening. It takes ten minutes and it is the whole reason the doc split is worth maintaining.

Read docs/README.md first if you are unsure which document a given piece of writing belongs in — this skill only covers moving things between HANDOFF and HISTORY.

The one rule

Verify against source, never against a commit message.

A commit that says "add the rules cap" may have added a constant and no gate. A commit that says "wire up X" may have wired half of it. The only evidence that an item shipped is the code that implements it.

Verify at a file:line, but write the citation as a symbol — the function, type, or constant. A line number in a doc is wrong the moment another lane lands, and it rots silently: on 2026-08-26 two refs drifted within the hour, and one of them was itself a repair of an earlier stale ref. Where a line is genuinely needed, name the commit it was verified against.

This is not pedantry — it is the specific failure that produced a 1,965-line handoff. Items were struck through when their commit landed, and the ones that were never struck through silently became indistinguishable from the ones that were never built.

Procedure

0. Claim the file before writing it

docs/HANDOFF.md and docs/HISTORY.md are single-writer documents that every lane accumulates into — announced, never raced. Before editing either:

ls .git/worktrees/*/MERGE_HEAD 2>/dev/null   # another lane mid-merge?

Check ListAgents for live peer sessions, say you are about to write the handoff, and sequence behind whoever already claimed it. Two sessions editing the same handoff is a conflict in the one file whose job is telling the next session what happened.

Read the full file on GitHub · 224 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. 4d ago First seen · 224 lines · 75 tokens per session scan A 1a7a618b0126

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository ljchang/mecha (6 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 2,358 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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