queue-handoff

A procedure for handing unfinished work to another agent or a human through durable queue items. A queue item records who owns the next step and why the work was handed over.

In plain words
What is it for?
Passing on the next task, recording blocked work, escalating issues, and closing work with a clear completion reason.
Why use it?
It keeps work from being stranded when a turn ends, an agent is interrupted, or another agent is blocking progress.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,681 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 $0.00094 $0.02681
Opus 5 $0.00047 $0.01340
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00536
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00268

Measured 2d ago against content hash c38a5b814158, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

queue-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.

packages/daemon/assets/plugins/openrig-core/skills/queue-handoff/SKILL.md · 193 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 193 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Queue Handoff

Durable work handoff via queue items. Lets the system keep moving through compactions, missed messages, and interruptions by passing the ball forward instead of leaving work suspended in chat or in-flight without an owner.

Use this when

  • Ending a turn on substantive work. Active work should end by passing the ball to an owner or to the human — never by going idle with the rig appearing dormant.
  • Finishing a slice that has a clear next step. Default-nudge: receiver gets a wake-ping plus the durable queue item.
  • Blocked on another agent's work. Park the qitem with closure_reason: blocked_on and the blocker qitem id.
  • Escalating to the human. Make the escalation a durable attention item, not just a chat message.

Don't use this when

  • The work is genuinely complete and there's no follow-on owner. Use closure_reason: no-follow-on (terminal completion) or canceled/denied as appropriate.
  • The handoff would be too small and turn work into bureaucracy. Bundle the work into a coherent slice instead of decomposing every step.
  • The handoff would be too broad and lose ownership/proof/closure criteria. Shape the qitem so the receiver knows the expected next action and closure evidence.

The hot-potato terminal-turn-rule

Active work ends by passing the ball to a named next owner or to the human. The qitem state machine enforces this:

pending → in-progress → done requires closure_reason from one of:

  • handed_off_to — work continues at a different seat (target = new owner)
  • blocked_on — parked pending another qitem (target = blocker qitem id)
  • denied — receiver rejected the work
  • canceled — sender or receiver withdrew
  • no-follow-on — terminal completion, nothing else needed
  • escalation — kicked up to a higher tier (target = escalation target)

Three of those (handed_off_to, blocked_on, escalation) additionally require closure_target. The daemon enforces this at the domain layer; every surface (CLI, MCP, future UI) inherits the same guarantee.

Read the full file on GitHub · 193 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 · 193 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A c38a5b814158

Subscribe to this mod's changes

queue-handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository mvschwarz/openrig (64 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 2,681 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 2026-08-30.