handoff

A structured document that records what a coding session accomplished, what remains, and what should happen next. It is written for someone starting with no knowledge of the previous conversation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when ending a session, handing work to another person or agent, reconnecting after an interrupted terminal session, or running low on conversation space.
Why use it?
It prevents the next developer or coding agent from repeating investigation and guessing what is unfinished. It also makes blockers and incomplete work explicit.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 88 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 565 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 $0.00088 $0.00565
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00282
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00113
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00056

Measured 2d ago against content hash 16999213ce72, 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 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.

core/skills/handoff/SKILL.md · 50 lines

What it actually says

Handoff

A handoff doc exists to save the next reader (a fresh session, a different agent, or you tomorrow) from re-deriving everything this session already figured out. Write for someone with zero memory of this conversation, not a recap for someone who was watching.

What to include

  • Goal. One sentence: what this session was actually trying to accomplish.
  • Done — verifiably. What's complete, stated as a fact a reader can check (a commit hash, a passing test name, a file path with the final content) — not "implemented X" without a way to confirm it.
  • In-flight / blocked. What's partially done, and specifically why it stopped — a failing test with its actual output, a decision waiting on the user, an external dependency not yet available. "Ran out of time" without a concrete blocker is not useful to the next reader.
  • Explicitly not done. Anything the goal implies but this session didn't touch — cheap to state, expensive for the next reader to discover by assuming it's covered.
  • Next concrete step. Not "continue the work" — the literal next action: which file, which command, which decision needs making first.
  • Decisions made and why. Only the ones that weren't obvious — a constraint that ruled out the default approach, a tradeoff chosen deliberately. Skip anything a reader could re-derive from the diff itself.

Where it goes

Don't silently create or overwrite a tracked file. Ask where it belongs if unclear, or default to an untracked scratch location (e.g. a HANDOFF.md at the repo root, gitignored, or the session's own scratchpad) — a handoff doc is working state, not something that should land in a PR by accident.

Keep it short

If the honest answer to "what's done" is "everything, cleanly" — say that in one line and stop. A handoff doc's value is proportional to how much re-derivation it saves, not its length.

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 · 50 lines · 88 tokens per session scan A 16999213ce72

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository patrickserrano/lacquer (3 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 88 tokens to every session and 565 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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