retiring-and-inheriting-a-seat

Retiring and Inheriting a Seat

A planned seat transition. A long-lived seat accumulates context; as it nears the window's edge, don't wait for compaction to degrade you into a cold-started agent — retire deliberately and hand the seat to a fresh successor primed from a packet plus the seat's accumulated lineage. The seat address is stable; its occupants are a lineage. Keep the transition and its authority explicit.

Use this when

• You are a sitting agent near your context threshold (~85%) with a planned transition (or a deliberate role change), and want the successor to start clean.
• You are priming a fresh successor into an existing seat.
• You are recording a tenure in the seat's lineage ledger / writing your tombstone.
• You are inheriting a seat and need the do-not-over-inherit framing.
• You want to consult the agent who sat in this seat before you.

Don't use this when

• Unplanned compaction or a crash already happened — that is the backstop path: session-compaction-and-restore / claude-compaction-restore.
• You need the seat-binding primitive mechanics (rebuild/fork/fresh, the two-outcome honesty model, the provenance schema) — seat-continuity-and-handover.
• The seat is fresh with no occupant to retire — rig launch / agent-starters.

Why planned handover beats riding compaction

Compaction is the crash-class backstop (it stays that). A planned handover is deliberate: you author the packet with a clear head before degradation sets in, the successor starts on a clean context, and the transition is auditable. Reach for this at a threshold you can see coming; fall back to compaction only when a transition wasn't planned.

The handover sequence

1. Trigger — the selected continuity threshold or a deliberate role transition. Use the configured policy and named transition owner; a context estimate alone does not authorize a cutover.
2. Author the handover packet, deliberately — a composed context pack carrying current work + next owner, the seat's durable pointers, constraints and authority boundaries, and the accumulated lineage wisdom ("those before you learned X"). This IS a restore packet in the session-compaction-and-restore 16-field contract — reuse that contract, don't reinvent it. Compose it with rig context compose (see openrig-user → "Context packs and paced delivery"). Enumerate the seat's standing duties as first-class packet content: what recurs, at what cadence, on which surface, and who will hold it after cutover. Carry each duty both in this packet and in durable seat state, because recurring duties are the content most often lost at a generation boundary while urgent one-off work carries cleanly.
3. Prime the fresh successor — rig walk the packet into the seat (paced delivery lets the successor absorb it in order), or launch-with-packet. The successor reads it as inheritance, not identity. The packet's first-read line MUST point the successor at orienting-to-an-inherited-seat — its world model of what a handover is. Carry that pointer in the durable packet artifact itself; never inject it as a runtime prompt keyed to the seat name (that runtime mechanism is the ghost-prompt class the orientation skill teaches successors to refuse). Artifact-carried survives the swap for free and needs no enabled gate.
4. Assess before cutover. If an apprenticeship or warm handoff is selected, use that staged window for questions and domain work before the owner decides. The incumbent retains authority until the owner-worded cutover; do not retire it merely to free a name while waiting for that decision.
5. Preserve the physical seat at cutover — follow the portable SOP linked from seat-continuity-and-handover. Keep the canonical tmux session, window and pane; resume the exact accepted successor history there and reconcile binding, environment, queue identity and attached clients. Preserve the incumbent's exact token as a cold-advisor handle when that is the selected disposition. Renaming tmux sessions is a repair fallback, not the default sequence.
6. Write the lineage-ledger row and tombstone (below). Record the actual outcomes and transfer each standing duty explicitly. Complete the successor's post-cutover self-check before unfreezing authority.