handoff

A procedure for handing a coordination session to a fresh session while preserving its task state and ongoing work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when the operator explicitly requests a handoff, reset, wrap-up, or session restart for supported always-running coordination agents.
Why use it?
It helps restart an operator-managed session without losing its conversation context, assigned tasks, messages, or other durable work.

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/zookanalytics/gc-toolkit/handoff
Any agent
npx skills add zookanalytics/gc-toolkit --skill handoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zookanalytics/gc-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 64 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,540 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 $0.00064 $0.01540
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00770
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00308
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00154

Measured 2d ago against content hash 5f6e225ef0c4, 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 · 158 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Handoff

Operator-initiated only. Do not invoke this skill without the operator asking for it. If you believe a handoff would help, raise the suggestion in conversation and let the operator decide.

Detect the session shape

This skill has one shape. Confirm you are in it by reading $GC_TEMPLATE:

  • Canonical path — controller-restartable named sessions: the always-on coordination agents in this city (mechanik, deacon, witness). Their mode = "always" declaration lets the controller stop and restart them cleanly when gc handoff fires. The transcript is replaced; durable state (beads, mail, work) survives.

If $GC_TEMPLATE falls outside that shape — a mode = "on_demand" session, or anything else — stop and confirm before proceeding. gc handoff will write the mail but cannot restart the user-attended process, so the next-life context is delayed until the operator manually restarts it. Surface the difference and let the operator decide.

If the operator wants a no-questions-asked close — no inventory, no carry-forward — that is the bye shell helper (! bye), not this skill.

What's being preserved

Conversational state, not work. Assigned beads, inbox mail, dispatched polecats, and durable bead-store records are picked up automatically by the next-life agent's startup checks. What disappears is the active discussion: what the operator and agent were mid-thread on. If it lives only in the transcript, it dies unless the handoff carries it.

The vehicle is the HANDOFF mail: the controller replaces the transcript and the next-life agent reads that mail on its first action. Anything not mentioned in the handoff body is intentionally forgotten.

When the operator asks for it

Recognize as triggers: "handoff", "fresh context" / "reset context" / "clean slate", "wrap this up and reset", "restart [mechanik/deacon] with a clean transcript". Ambiguous phrasings ("let's wrap up" alone) get clarified first: "Do you want a handoff (fresh transcript) or just a summary in place?"

Read the full file on GitHub · 158 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. 2d ago First seen · 158 lines · 64 tokens per session scan A 5f6e225ef0c4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

handoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository zookanalytics/gc-toolkit (5 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 64 tokens to every session and 1,540 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 2026-08-31.

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