Handoff

Handoff

A handoff works because the next context can act on exact paths and facts without trusting the author's memory; any line the reader cannot verify from the artifact itself is decoration, not handoff.

Write a factual session artifact that another context can read. Include:

• caller-supplied goal and summary;
• completed artifacts and exact evidence paths;
• unresolved facts or risks;
• optional caller-supplied continuation text;
• best-effort read-only repository identity when useful.

Do not infer a next action, select work, assign ownership, consume the artifact, change tracker or Git state, classify a verdict, govern retries, or restart a runtime. Reading a handoff must not mutate it.

Named failure mode — optimistic closure: writing "done" for work whose evidence path does not exist, so the next context builds on a phantom.

Anti-pattern: narrating the session chronologically ("first I tried…, then…"). Corrective: record end-state facts — artifacts, paths, unresolved risks — and drop the journey.

The ao session handoff and ao session rehydrate commands implement the same boundary for JSON artifacts. The skill may write Markdown when that better serves a human, but the content semantics remain identical.

Return the artifact path and stop.