handover

Handover note

The global operating rules define context bands: green below 50%, yellow 50 to 65%, amber 65 to 75%, red above 75%. At yellow, mention the reading and keep commits small with explicit scope cuts. At amber, take no new work units. At red, stop and hand over. This skill defines what the handover contains and how to produce it.

When this applies

• The context band reaches amber or red.
• The user says "wrap up", "handover", "hand off", or similar.
• A long session is ending deliberately and the next session needs to resume cleanly.

Step 1: measure, never estimate

Run /context first and use the real figure. Do not guess or estimate the percentage. Run /context and use the figure it returns. The whole point of the bands is that the decision to wrap is made on a real reading, not a feeling.

Where the harness cannot invoke /context — a non-interactive orchestrator or headless session — an honest gap is the reading. Write "no reading — /context unavailable in this harness" verbatim into the note's wrap-up context, never an invented or estimated percentage, and make the band decision from the harness's own signals (context-compaction warnings, summarisation system reminders). Five consecutive sessions on one project (2026-07-31 to 2026-08-12) wrote that gap into prose and re-declared this rule change due before the rule caught up with the harness it actually runs in.

Step 2: the handover note

A fixed shape, so the next session can read it once and resume:

1. Session goal. One line: what this session set out to do.
2. Branch and worktree. The working branch, and the worktree path if non-standard. The next session starts on main by default and otherwise has to rediscover this from git log.
3. What landed. Commits and PRs with sha and a one-line description each. Mark each as verified or unverified.
4. In flight. What is half-done, with exact file:line ranges, not bare paths. Enough that the next session can open the file at the right place.
5. Deferred items. Every item deferred this session, each with its grep anchor, per the flag-deferred-items skill. The note records where the anchor was planted.
6. Verification still outstanding. Migration catalog queries to run, smokes to run, post-rollout checks not yet done.
7. Blockers and open questions. Anything waiting on a decision or an external answer.
8. Next actions. Ordered and concrete. Each is a single first step, not a theme.
9. Traps and working agreements. Project-specific gotchas surfaced this session, plus standing rules that bit or nearly bit (confirm before push, money is pounds not pence, grep the live schema rather than trusting handover docs).