Handoff
Passing work to a fresh context, deliberately and with a written brief.
Ending one agent session and starting another with a curated summary of what matters: the goal, what has been tried, what the next step is. A good handoff is an artifact, not a vibe.
Handoffs exist because long sessions rot. A two-minute write-up before clearing usually produces a better next hour than pushing on with a degraded context.
Keep the brief short, and write it for someone who was not there. But short does not mean vague: the two things that most improve the next session are the decisions already made with their reasons, and the dead ends — both prevent re-litigating work that is already settled.
The brief that beat a full context
Handing a half-finished refactor to a fresh session.
Two hundred words: the goal, the approach chosen and why, what is already merged, what is broken, the next concrete step. The fresh session starts productive immediately, where the original context would have carried hours of noise alongside the same information.
- blogEffective harnesses for long-running agents ↗
The initializer-plus-incremental-sessions pattern for work that outlives a context window, and the four ways it fails: doing too much, losing context between sessions, declaring victory early, not testing end to end.
- docsAgents ↗
Compares a managed hosted agent, an in-app SDK loop, and the raw Responses API, including sessions, handoffs, approvals, sandboxing and compaction.
Clearing · Context reset
Deliberately throwing away the context to get a clean head.
Compaction · Summarisation
Replacing old context with a shorter summary of it.
Session
One continuous run of work with the agent, with its own accumulated history.
Handoff Artifact · Brief
The document that makes a fresh context productive in one read.
Spec · Specification
A written description of the intended outcome, before the work starts.