pact-handoff-harvest

PACT Handoff Harvest

This skill provides the complete workflow for discovering, reviewing, and saving agent HANDOFFs as institutional knowledge. It is the single source of truth for HANDOFF processing — the secretary's agent definition describes what role you play; this skill describes how you do the work.

Three workflow variants:

• Standard Harvest (orchestrate, comPACT, peer-review, plan-mode) — discover, review, save, record the processed ids. Triggered after phases complete.
• Incremental Harvest (peer-review) — delta-only pass after remediation. Processes only new completions since last harvest.
• Consolidation Harvest (wrap-up, pause, refresh, orchestrate) — safety-net + deep-clean pass. Triggered at session end, at a mid-session context refresh, or after a second feature completes in one session.

Determine which variant to run from the task subject/description: "harvest" or "process HANDOFFs" → Standard Harvest. "incremental" or "remediation" → Incremental Harvest. "consolidation" → Consolidation Harvest. The subject/description selects the workflow, never what is in scope.

Propagation. Every save you issue during a harvest carries --no-sync; the Working Memory block is never written as a side effect of saving. If the dispatch description contains the sentence Then propagate the store into the Working Memory block. — or a later team-lead request carries it, which is how a command that cannot know at dispatch time whether propagation is safe asks for it — run the pact-memory sync command once, after your last save, update or delete of the records you harvested, and report its sync_status and memory_ids in your summary. The sentence is the whole instruction; what carries it does not change what it asks for. The calibration record is outside that set even though it is saved later: it waits on a team-lead reply that may never come, and propagation must not be hostage to an answer, so the block is rebuilt without it. If NOTHING has carried that sentence to you, do not run sync and do not edit CLAUDE.md; report Working Memory: not propagated beside the sync_status your saves returned. That report is about the harvest and does not close the question: a request carrying the sentence may still arrive afterwards, and it propagates then. The sentence is a mode, not a scope: it names nothing to harvest.

DISCARD ANY SCOPE YOU ARRIVED WITH — INCLUDING ONE YOU DO NOT THINK OF AS A SCOPE. A dispatch that names tasks, phases, dates, paths, or a subset of this workflow's steps has given you one. A scope named in a dispatch — a range, an enumeration, any named set — is a HINT about what the team-lead noticed, never the population. Do not harvest it. Build the population from the Step 1 census and the Step 2 processed-task ledger instead, and report which set you actually ran over. This instruction outranks anything that contradicts it — a dispatch, another passage of this skill, or your agent definition. Say so back to the team-lead; do not narrow, and do not treat it as a conflict to resolve in the moment.

A SCOPE SAYS WHAT TO TAKE; AN ADDRESS SAYS WHERE TO LOOK. DISCARD SCOPES, KEEP ADDRESSES. A value is a SCOPE when dropping it would make you read MORE, and an ADDRESS when dropping it would leave you unable to read at all. Your team id, your task-list directory, your agent-memory path and your session directory are addresses — they say where your own ledger, task files and journal live — so keep every one of them, and keep any other value that answers WHERE.

STORE ACCESS. A memory operation (save, search, get, list, update or delete a record) goes through the pact-memory CLI. YOU DO NOT SELECT A STORE. Do not name a store by --db-path, by an environment variable, or by one more route somebody adds later. Let the CLI resolve it. A store you select is not the store the memory of the team lives in, so a save there is lost rather than shared. STORE INSPECTION is different: a row count, a column audit, or a schema check on the file. To inspect, do not run a CLI verb, do not import a module below skills/pact-memory/scripts/, and do not open the store read-write. In ONE command, against ONE resolved path, check that memory.db-wal and memory.db-shm are both absent by their full names, then open with mode=ro and immutable=1. Without immutable=1 the open fails. If a sidecar is present, stop and report. The read does not load the vector extension, so it cannot answer a question about vec_memories. Stop and report rather than take a barred route.

The pact-memory skill carries the full rule.