checkpoint-handoff

checkpoint-handoff is a skill for Claude Code from mikestangdevs/craft-skills. It costs 151 tokens per session (1,277 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A handoff process that records unfinished project work in a durable document before a context limit, session end, or change of agent. The document preserves completed work, open tasks, constraints, and decisions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before context compaction, at the end of a long session, or when handing multi-session work to another agent.
Why use it?
It prevents the next session from having to reconstruct project state from shortened conversation history.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the craft-skills plugin — 17 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it before context compaction, at the end of a long session, or when handing multi-session work to another agent.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/checkpoint-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 mikestangdevs/craft-skills --skill checkpoint-handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mikestangdevs/craft-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install craft-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 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 checkpoint-handoff

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/checkpoint-handoff/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/checkpoint-handoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/checkpoint-handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/checkpoint-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 checkpoint-handoff

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/checkpoint-handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/checkpoint-handoff.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 151 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,277 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 $0.00151 $0.01277
Opus 5 $0.00076 $0.00639
Sonnet 5 $0.00030 $0.00255
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00128

Measured 9d ago against content hash 788d28f08b01, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

checkpoint-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 9d 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/rigor/checkpoint-handoff/SKILL.md · 81 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Checkpoint Handoff

The failure mode this fixes

Long projects outlive context windows. The session that planned the work is never the session that finishes it — compaction, restarts, and tomorrow all guarantee that. And when the boundary hits without preparation, the next session starts by reconstructing instead of working: re-deriving the plan, re-discovering which tasks were done, re-learning the constraint the user stated forcefully forty turns ago, and — worst — confidently redoing or undoing finished work because nothing recorded that it was finished.

Conversation memory is the wrong place for project state. Summaries compress; the exact rule ("never X, always Y"), the precise task ordering, and the "we already tried that, it fails because Z" knowledge are exactly what compression loses. The fix is mechanical: before the boundary, the state gets written to durable files, structured for a cold reader.

When to Use This Skill

  • The user says they're about to compact, or you notice the context getting heavy mid-project
  • A session is ending with the project unfinished (i.e., almost every session of a real project)
  • Work is being handed to another agent, a fresh session, or a parallel worker
  • A phased plan is mid-flight — some tasks done, some in progress, some queued
  • You were just asked "where were we?" — the skill fired one session too late

Don't use when: the task is single-session and will finish here; a checkpoint of a finished task is just a report. Don't checkpoint into the conversation itself — a summary message that will be compacted along with everything else is not a checkpoint.

Instructions

1. Write to durable files, not to the chat

The checkpoint lives where compaction can't touch it: a working doc in the repo (PLAN.md, a project doc, whatever the project already uses), agent memory if available, a tracked task list. If a working doc already exists, update it — a trail of stale plan files is its own failure mode.

2. Record state as facts, not narrative

Read the full file on GitHub · 81 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. 9d ago First seen · 81 lines · 151 tokens per session scan A 788d28f08b01

Subscribe to this mod's changes

checkpoint-handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository mikestangdevs/craft-skills (4 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 151 tokens to every session and 1,277 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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