handoff

A written summary that transfers the important context from one development session to another. It records the goal, progress, decisions, changed files, blockers, and next steps in handoff.md.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting a new work phase, moving work to another session, or preparing instructions for someone to continue the project.
Why use it?
It prevents a new session or developer from having to reconstruct what happened and what still needs attention.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vaayne/agent-kit/handoff
Any agent
npx skills add vaayne/agent-kit --skill handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vaayne/agent-kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 486 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00068 $0.00486
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00243
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00097
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00049

Measured 2d ago against content hash 45641129e3e2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 2d 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/SKILL.md · 73 lines

What it actually says

Handoff

Generate a session summary and write it to handoff.md so a new session can pick up where this one left off.

Workflow

  1. Analyze the current session — gather goals, progress, decisions, file changes, blockers, and next steps.
  2. Write handoff.md — save the summary to handoff.md in the project root (overwrite if exists).
  3. Guide the user — tell the user to start a new session with: read handoff.md and continue the work.

Handoff File Template

Write handoff.md using this structure:

# Handoff

## Goal

[Original objective of this session]

## Progress

- [What was completed]
- [What was partially done]

## Key Decisions

- [Decision 1 and why]
- [Decision 2 and why]

## Files Changed

- `path/to/file1` — [what changed]
- `path/to/file2` — [what changed]

## Current State

[Where things stand right now — what works, what doesn't]

## Blockers / Gotchas

- [Any issues, edge cases, or warnings for the next session]

## Next Steps

1. [Concrete next action]
2. [Follow-up action]

Guidelines

  • Be self-contained — the new session must understand the full picture without the old conversation.
  • Be concise — include only what's relevant; skip empty sections.
  • Focus on decisions and rationale — what was decided and why, not the full discussion.
  • List concrete files with context — path + what changed, not just paths.
  • State next steps as actionable tasks — clear enough to execute immediately.

After Writing

Confirm the file was written and instruct the user:

handoff.md has been saved. To continue in a new session, start with:

read handoff.md and continue the work
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. 2d ago First seen · 73 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A 45641129e3e2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository vaayne/agent-kit (53 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 486 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-30.

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