skills/docs/productivity/handoff.md
Matt Pocock f5ed5657bd docs: add human-facing pages for the remaining 22 promoted skills
Adds a docs page for every promoted skill that lacked one, following
.agents/writing-docs.md and using docs/engineering/to-prd.md as the
worked exemplar. Covers all of engineering/ (bar to-prd, already done),
productivity/, and misc/.

Each page states its load-bearing constraint, its invocation mode and
trigger boundary, surfaces the skill's leading word, and routes back to
ask-matt so the set forms a connected router with no dead ends.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-01 11:18:17 +01:00

2.3 KiB

Quickstart:

npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=handoff
npx skills update handoff

Source

What it does

handoff compacts the current conversation into a handoff document — a single write-up a fresh agent can read to pick up the work where you left off.

The load-bearing constraint: it does not re-state what already lives elsewhere. Anything captured in a PRD, plan, ADR, issue, commit, or diff is referenced by path or URL, never copied. The document carries only the live thread — what you were doing, why, and what's next — and it's saved to your OS's temporary directory, not into the workspace, so it never becomes another artifact to maintain.

When to reach for it

You invoke this by typing /handoff — the agent won't reach for it on its own. Pass a note about what the next session is for and the document is tailored to it.

Reach for this when a conversation has gone long enough that its context is at risk — you're near a context limit, wrapping for the day, or deliberately handing the work to another agent — and you want the thread preserved without dragging the whole transcript along.

What the document carries

  • The live thread — what's in flight and why, in the conversation's own terms, minus anything already written down elsewhere.
  • Suggested skills — a pointer to the skills the next agent should reach for to continue.
  • References, not copies — links and paths to the PRDs, plans, ADRs, issues, and diffs that hold the settled detail.
  • Redacted secrets — API keys, passwords, and PII stripped before the document is written.

The idea to hold onto is compaction: a handoff is the conversation squeezed down to just its resumable core, so a fresh agent inherits the momentum, not the noise.

Where it fits

handoff is a reach-for-it-anytime standalone — it sits at the seam between two sessions rather than inside a build chain. It pairs naturally with the artifact-producing skills whose output it points at: to-prd, because a finished PRD is exactly the kind of settled detail a handoff references instead of repeating. When you're unsure which skill fits the moment, ask-matt routes you.