Handoff Artifact
Artefak Serah-Terima
A document used as the carry mechanism for a handoff: written by one session, read by another.
A handoff artifact is a document that carries work from one session to another: a spec, a ticket, a written summary, a plan. It is the physical mechanism behind a handoff, and its quality decides whether the handoff works.
The failure mode is a summary written for a person. It reads smoothly, it is full of conclusions, and it carries none of the reasoning. The next session receives conclusions without the context that made them, and either redoes the work or, worse, trusts a decision whose reasoning nobody can reconstruct.
A good artifact states the decisions and why, what is still open, where the work stands, and where the primary sources are. It links rather than pastes, because pasted content is stale the moment it is copied. And it separates what was decided from what was merely discussed, which is the distinction that stops the next session from treating a brainstorm as a commitment.
Related terms
Handoff
Moving work from one session, or one agent, to another without losing the thread.
Spec
A written description of what to build, written before building it.
Ticket
A unit of work small enough to be scoped, done, and checked.
Primary Source
The thing itself: code, transcripts, raw data. Complete and authoritative, but expensive to load.
Context Engineering
Deciding what goes into the model's context, and what stays out.
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