Handoff Artifact
also called Brief, Handover doc
The document that makes a fresh context productive in one read.
A written summary passed between sessions or between people and agents: current state, decisions made and why, dead ends to avoid, the immediate next step. Designed to be read cold.
The discipline of writing it is half the value. Producing a handoff forces you to notice that you no longer know what you are doing.
Make it durable — a file in the repository or a comment on the ticket, not a message lost in a transcript. The test of a good handoff artifact is that somebody can act on it cold, without asking a single clarifying question.
Progress notes as a first-class output
An overnight agent is expected to stop partway through a migration.
Require it to leave a status file: what moved, what remains, which files it could not handle. The next run — or a person in the morning — resumes rather than starting the inventory from scratch, which is where most of the time would otherwise go.
- 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.
- blogScaling managed agents: decoupling the brain from the hands ↗
Separates model, harness, durable session log and execution sandbox — the architecture that makes long-running agents survive crashes and tool boundaries.
Handoff
Passing work to a fresh context, deliberately and with a written brief.
Spec · Specification
A written description of the intended outcome, before the work starts.
Ticket
The unit of delegated work, with scope and a definition of done.
Compaction · Summarisation
Replacing old context with a shorter summary of it.