Handoff
Serah-Terima
Moving work from one session, or one agent, to another without losing the thread.
A handoff is the transfer of work with enough context that the receiver can continue. The context can be a session, another agent, a colleague, or a future version of yourself.
The hard part is that context has a cost. A handoff document that captures everything is too long to read; one that captures the highlights drops the details that turn out to matter. The good handoff states the decisions made and why, what is still open, and where the work stands, and links to the primary sources rather than pasting them.
The most common handoff failure is a summary written for a person, full of conclusions and none of the reasoning, so the receiver cannot tell which conclusions are load-bearing.
Related terms
Compaction
Summarising the old conversation so the new part fits in the window.
Session
One bounded run of work with an agent, from the first message to the end.
Memory
A system's ability to carry information from one request to the next.
Context Engineering
Deciding what goes into the model's context, and what stays out.
Ticket
A unit of work small enough to be scoped, done, and checked.
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