retire

Call relay as ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/bin/relay (Claude Code substitutes the plugin's absolute path when this skill loads) — not bare relay, which often isn't on the Bash tool's non-interactive PATH.

Run: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/bin/relay retire $session_id

That closes the session (as superseded by its seed, tab and all — same teardown as /relay:close) and writes a successor seed to its state dir: an index of every packet it was sent, with each report's outcome line, Status, Risk flags and UNVERIFIED — plus the worktree and topic it owned. The seed is an INDEX, not a transcript: the detail stays in the linked reports.

Then spawn the successor with the seed, exactly as the retire message tells you:

${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/bin/relay spawn $worktree $topic $packet --seed $retired_session_id --lead "$CLAUDE_CODE_SESSION_ID"

The seed is appended to the fresh executor's packet as inherited context (task first, seed second, GATES last), so the successor starts knowing what happened on this territory without reading anything else. You can also pass a path to the seed file instead of the retired session's id.

When to reach for this instead of /relay:send. A long-lived executor accumulates context; a fresh one starts sharp. Retire when a session is getting heavy, has finished a phase of work, or is dead/stalled with useful history behind it — the seed is what makes respawning cheap enough to actually do, so don't keep piling packets onto a heavy session just to avoid the rebuild cost. Heaviness is not degradation, though: a disciplined executor can do fine work deep in a session, so this is a judgement call, not a rule.

Refusals you may hit:

• still busy on packet NNN and has not reported — retiring now kills that packet's work unreported, and the seed can't summarise a report that was never written. Wait for it (/relay:check), or pass --force to retire anyway (that packet is then seeded as NO REPORT). A session that is busy but provably stuck — its transcript hasn't been written for longer than stall_threshold_seconds, the shape an executor waiting on an unanswerable OS prompt takes — is accepted without --force: there is nothing live left to interrupt.
• already retired — the seed already exists; the message prints its path. Just spawn with it.

(--keep-tab retires but leaves the terminal tab open, same as /relay:close.)