writing-handoff

writing-handoff is a skill for Claude Code from se4thvin/context-handoff. It costs 93 tokens per session (1,328 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for saving the current coding session's state in a handoff file for later use.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps record progress so another session or person can continue the work.
Why use it?
It preserves important context when a session is ending or nearing its context limit.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the context-handoff plugin — 2 skills, 2 commands shipped together

Good fit It helps record progress so another session or person can continue the work.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/se4thvin/context-handoff/writing-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 se4thvin/context-handoff --skill writing-handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/se4thvin/context-handoff

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install context-handoff, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills, 2 commands.

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 writing-handoff

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/se4thvin/context-handoff/writing-handoff/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/se4thvin/context-handoff/writing-handoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/se4thvin/context-handoff/writing-handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/se4thvin/context-handoff/writing-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 writing-handoff

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/se4thvin/context-handoff/writing-handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/se4thvin/context-handoff/writing-handoff.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,328 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 $0.00093 $0.01328
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00664
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00266
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00133

Measured 8d ago against content hash 6f71f48a1bb8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

writing-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 8d 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/writing-handoff/SKILL.md · 110 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 110 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing a Handoff

Overview

Save the current session's state to a Markdown file so a future session (or another person) can pick up cleanly. This skill is intentionally conservative about triggering: it fires on explicit invocation or real context-pressure signals, never on generic "let's wrap up" phrasing.

When to use

Fire this skill when ANY of:

  • The user invokes /handoff (with or without a label argument).
  • The user explicitly asks: "write a handoff", "save state", "save session", "make a handoff".
  • The user signals context exhaustion specifically: "running low on context", "almost out of context", "context is getting full", "we're near the limit".
  • A system reminder about auto-compaction appears in the conversation.

Do NOT fire on:

  • Generic session-ending phrases: "wrap up", "let's stop", "call it a day", "I'm tired", "let's call it here" — unless the user explicitly ties them to context limits.
  • Mid-task pauses or breaks.

If unsure, ASK the user before writing — a one-line confirmation is cheaper than a wrong handoff.

What to do

  1. Resolve the output directory:

    • If env var HANDOFF_DIR is set, use it.
    • Otherwise, use ./.handoffs/ relative to the current working directory.
    • Create the directory if it does not exist: mkdir -p <dir>.
  2. Collect context (run these in parallel where possible):

    • Project name: basename "$(pwd)"
    • Current ISO timestamp: date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"
    • Filename timestamp: date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H%M"
    • If .git exists in cwd or any parent:
      • Branch: git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD
      • Uncommitted: git status --short
      • Recent commits: git log -5 --oneline
    • Otherwise mark git fields as n/a.
  3. Build the filename:

    • Base: <filename-timestamp>.md (e.g., 2026-05-12-1430.md)
    • If a label was provided (via /handoff <label> or the user's phrasing), slugify it and append. Use this exact one-liner to get deterministic results across sessions:
      SLUG=$(printf '%s' "$LABEL" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | sed 's/[^a-z0-9]/-/g; s/-\{2,\}/-/g; s/^-//; s/-$//' | cut -c1-40)
      
      This produces ASCII lowercase, hyphens for any non-alphanumeric (including Unicode), collapsed dashes, no leading/trailing dashes, max 40 characters. If the result is empty (e.g. label was --!--), drop the label and use only the timestamp filename. Example: label Before refactor — auth!before-refactor-auth → filename 2026-05-12-1430-before-refactor-auth.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 110 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. 8d ago First seen · 110 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A 6f71f48a1bb8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository se4thvin/context-handoff (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 1,328 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 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

alive:save

The human wants to checkpoint. Or: the stash has grown heavy — 5+ items, 30+ minutes, a natural pause in the work. The squirrel doesn't decide when to save. It surfaces the need and lets the human pull the trigger. Runs the full save protocol: confirms stash, writes log, updates state, generates projections…

alivecontext/alive · 78 tokens

alive:capture-context

Use when external content arrives in the session — emails, transcripts, screenshots, documents, files, or in-session research worth keeping. Also use when there's nothing obvious to capture — the skill checks 03Inbox/ for unrouted files and enters inbox scan mode. Stores raw content, routes to bundles, extracts tasks…

alivecontext/alive · 74 tokens

alive:load-context

The human mentions a walnut to work on, asks about a specific venture/experiment/project, or wants to check status — not just explicit 'load X'. Load the brief pack (3 files), resolve the people involved, check the active bundle — then surface one observation and ask what to work on. Context loads in tiers: walnut and…

alivecontext/alive · 81 tokens

alive:session-history

Revive sessions (quick or heavy), browse, and search — 'what happened recently?', 'find the session where we discussed X', 'revive yesterday's session'. For single-session recall and multi-session browsing. If the human needs to merge multiple sessions into one working context or detect conflicts between parallel…

alivecontext/alive · 76 tokens

alive:mine-for-context

Deep context extraction from source material. Creates reference bundles, builds extraction plans, tracks what's been extracted, and discovers new targets — people, subjects, patterns, connections. The archaeologist that turns raw sources into structured knowledge. Can be invoked by alive:session-history for targeted…

alivecontext/alive · 63 tokens

alive:my-context-graph

Render an interactive map of your world. Generates the world index from all walnut and bundle frontmatter, then produces a force-directed graph showing connections between walnuts, people, bundles, and tags. Opens in the browser.

alivecontext/alive · 50 tokens