Handoff
Handoff
Notes one agent leaves so the next one can resume without starting over
✓ Runtime & SessionWhat is a Handoff
A handoff is a written record one agent leaves for the next: what it did, what it found, what decisions it made and why, and what is still unresolved. It exists because a session's context does not automatically carry forward into a new one. Without a handoff, a fresh session starts genuinely blank, no matter how much work happened before it.
A good handoff is not a task list, it is closer to what a competent teammate would tell a colleague before going off shift: the gotchas discovered, the approach that failed and why, the API quirk that cost an hour to find. That is the information that actually saves the next agent from repeating the same mistakes rather than just knowing what to do next.
A handoff is not the same as a memory file that persists indefinitely across all future sessions. It is usually scoped to one piece of work, written once the work pauses or a task completes, and read once by whoever picks it back up. Multiple agents working in parallel on the same project often rely on a shared handoff log as their only coordination mechanism.
Without the write step, everything the first session learned is gone the moment it ends. The handoff file is the only thing bridging two otherwise disconnected context windows.
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