handoff-recover

handoff-recover is a skill for Claude Code from Sting25/claude-code-handoff. It costs 0 tokens per session (4,779 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A recovery tool for restoring a written summary of a previous Claude Code session when the normal handoff step was not run. A handoff is a saved record of repository state and work context for continuing later.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to reconstruct the current handoff from saved session data and continue work with the recovered repository state and earlier context.
Why use it?
It helps recover context after a crash, closed terminal, or session compaction when the available snapshot contains little or no curated explanation. It requires the handoff scripts and hooks to be installed.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT variable. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions Claude Code.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the claude-code-handoff plugin — 3 skills, 6 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to reconstruct the current handoff from saved session data and continue work with the recovered repository state and earlier context.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add Sting25/claude-code-handoff
Claude Code
/plugin install claude-code-handoff

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-code-handoff, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 6 hooks.

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-recover

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sting25/claude-code-handoff/handoff-recover/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sting25/claude-code-handoff/handoff-recover)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sting25/claude-code-handoff/handoff-recover"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sting25/claude-code-handoff/handoff-recover/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-recover

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sting25/claude-code-handoff/handoff-recover"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sting25/claude-code-handoff/handoff-recover.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,779 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 $0.00000 $0.04779
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.02389
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00956
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00478

Measured 9d ago against content hash 8f3bfd82c127, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

handoff-recover 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 9d 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/handoff-recover/SKILL.md · 371 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 371 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/handoff-recover — retroactive handoff composition

Prerequisite: this skill leans on scripts and hooks from https://github.com/Sting25/claude-code-handoff — the raw dumps it recovers from are written by the Stop hook, and it runs handoff_recover_tail.sh / write_handoff.sh from ~/.claude/bin/ (script install) or the plugin's bin/ (plugin install). None of that ships with this file alone; run ./install.sh from that repo (or install the plugin) once per machine first.

The previous session ended without running /handoff — crashed, killed, terminal closed, or just never invoked. SessionEnd wrote a safety-net snapshot, so handoff_current.md has git state but no curated Notes. The SessionStart hook detected this and printed an ACTION banner telling you to invoke this skill.

Note: since the PreCompact hook joined the safety net, a placeholder can also be written MID-session (an uncurated session that hit auto or manual compaction), not only at session end — so this banner can appear even though the "previous session" is the same still-running conversation, freshly compacted. The recovery flow is identical: the raw dump covers the pre-compact turns that compaction summarized away.

This skill reconstructs what the previous session would have written into Notes if /handoff had run, using the raw per-turn dump and the prior history snapshot. The reconstruction is best-effort — it will miss things only the live model knew — but it puts a working baseline into the current session's context and persists it back into handoff_current.md so it's not lost again.

When to invoke

  • Auto-triggered by the SessionStart banner. When the hook output contains ACTION: RUN /handoff-recover, invoke this skill as the first action of the session, before doing any new work.
  • User invokes /handoff-recover explicitly. Same flow.
  • You notice the placeholder yourself. If handoff_current.md contains the <!-- HANDOFF_PLACEHOLDER: keep until /handoff replaces this block --> sentinel (or the legacy "The /handoff skill should append decisions" line) but the hook didn't flag it (e.g. HANDOFF_SS_DISABLE_RECOVER was set), invoke anyway — the recovery is still useful.

Read the full file on GitHub · 371 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. 9d ago First seen · 371 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 8f3bfd82c127

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff-recover is a skill published in the GitHub repository Sting25/claude-code-handoff (5 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 4,779 tokens. 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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