handoff

handoff is a skill for Claude Code from SerenecoTech/agent-skills. It costs 41 tokens per session (2,553 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A handoff guide for recording unfinished coding-agent work in HANDOFF.md so another session can continue it. A handoff summarizes the current task, context, and next entry point.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when switching sessions, preparing for compaction, clearing context, or explicitly summarizing work for a future agent.
Why use it?
It prevents a fresh agent from having to reconstruct incomplete work after a context limit, reset, or session change.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the handoff plugin — 2 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when switching sessions, preparing for compaction, clearing context, or explicitly summarizing work for a future agent.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

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

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 handoff

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/serenecotech/agent-skills/handoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/serenecotech/agent-skills/handoff.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,553 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 $0.00041 $0.02553
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01277
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00511
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00255

Measured 8d ago against content hash 7cbaba22f92a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, 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 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.

plugins/handoff/skills/handoff/SKILL.md · 218 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 218 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Handoff

Write HANDOFF.md so a fresh agent can pick up in-flight work without re-deriving context. Pulls from three context sources: built-in user memory, per-project memsearch recall, and non-boilerplate project docs. The ▶ Resume This Work block at the top is the entry point the handoff-resume skill acts on to continue without re-prompting.

When to Use

  • User says "handoff", "wrap up", "summarize for next session", invokes /handoff
  • About to /clear, compact context, or end a session mid-task
  • Context window approaching limit and work is unfinished
  • Switching between agents/sessions on the same task

Proactively offer (do not auto-write) when context is clearly running low and the task is incomplete: "Want me to write a handoff before we continue?" Never write one without confirmation outside an explicit request.

Do NOT use for:

  • Completed tasks (the diff/PR/commit is the handoff)
  • One-shot questions
  • Tasks already fully captured by memory entries

Where It Goes

  • Default: HANDOFF.md in current working directory
  • If HANDOFF.md already exists: create .claude/handoff/ if missing, move existing file to .claude/handoff/handoff-<YYYYMMDD-HHMM>.md, then write the new one. Never silent overwrite.
  • Unsafe cwd (~, /, anywhere outside an actual project): stop and ask for a path

Process

  1. Gather git state (parallel):
    • git status
    • git diff --stat
    • git log --oneline -10
  2. Archive existing HANDOFF.md per the rule above
  3. Discover context sources (parallel):
    • Built-in agent memory (if the harness provides one): the session's own memory directory — for Claude Code, ~/.claude/projects/<project-slug>/memory/*.md (skim the MEMORY.md index first). Skip if your harness has no file-based memory.
    • Project memsearch (capability, not files; optional): if .memsearch/ exists, memsearch is active. Don't enumerate or link the daily logs; instead derive 2-5 recall seed queries from this session's work for the next agent to search (optionally sanity-check with memsearch search "<topic>").
    • Project context docs: glob **/*.md in cwd, exclude boilerplate and build dirs (see below), surface anything non-standard
  4. Extract from conversation:
    • Original goal
    • Done vs. not done
    • Failed approaches — highest-value section, mandatory if any exist
    • Decisions and why
    • User preferences expressed this session
    • Errors hit and how they resolved
  5. Cross-link, don't duplicate:
    • Memory entries → [[memory-slug]]
    • Project docs → relative path and one-line relevance
  6. Write HANDOFF.md using the template
  7. Verify by re-reading as if you were a fresh agent. Gaps? Fix them before declaring done.

Read the full file on GitHub · 218 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 · 218 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 7cbaba22f92a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository SerenecoTech/agent-skills (2 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 2,553 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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