passdown-pickup

Passdown Pickup

Start of shift: read the previous passdown before touching anything. The handoff wrote state into small files; pickup turns those files back into working context for a fraction of what replaying a transcript costs.

Configuration (read first)

Build the effective passdown configuration root-to-nearest. Read applicable AGENTS.md files from the workspace/repository root down to the current directory, plus any parent file explicitly referenced by a thin entrypoint. Merge ## passdown keys in that order: nearer values override the same key and inherit omitted keys. Resolve relative paths against the file that declared them.

The effective configuration should contain:

## passdown
- log_dir: <path for session logs>
- planning: markdown | openspec   # used to locate plan state
- plan_dir: <path for markdown plans>   # when planning: markdown

If log_dir is still missing, ask where session logs live and suggest adding it to the appropriate AGENTS.md.

Process

1. Locate the handoff: list <log_dir> and sort by the filename's date and HHMMSS suffix, newest first. Read the newest log's frontmatter (status, branch, agent, plan); also read the frontmatter of any other recent logs, in case another agent worked in parallel. Frontmatter first, full text only for the logs that matter — that is what keeps pickup cheap.
2. Read the passdown: for the relevant log(s), read Summary, Next steps, and especially Caveats / traps in full. Task state lives in the plan; session-scoped traps live nowhere but the log.
3. Verify against reality — files may have moved on since the log was written:
   • the current branch vs the log's branch:;
   • git status and recent commits vs the log's "What was done";
   • each plan listed in plan: (a single path or a YAML list, resolved from the workspace root) — compare its checkboxes and any Dispatched: outcome lines against the log's next steps. Report any mismatch instead of silently reconciling it; the working tree and the plan win over the log.
4. Brief, then wait: report status, verified next steps, and the traps. Pickup produces a briefing and a proposed first action — it never starts executing on its own. If the proposed work is a multi-task plan, the passdown-dispatch gate still applies before implementation.