Session handoff

Skill jqaisystems/jqai-ai-skills/skills/session-handoff

MIT reusable AI skills for Codex and Claude Code: safe publishing, research briefs, case studies, web scraping, copy cleanup, and release automation.

Install

npx -y skills add jqaisystems/jqai-ai-skills --skill session-handoff

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

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Write a start-here handoff document at the end of a work session capturing state, decisions, next steps, and gotchas, so the next session (or the next person) resumes in minutes instead of re-deriving everything. Use when the user says "wrap up", "handoff", "end of session", "write a handoff note", or "where did we leave off" at the start of a new session.

SKILL.md

2.8 KB, 551 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Session Handoff

Context dies between sessions. The next session re-reads files, re-discovers decisions, and re-hits the same trap that cost an hour last time. This skill freezes the session's working state into one document built to be read cold.

Step 1: Mine the session

Extract from the current conversation, not from memory of what should have happened:

What was accomplished: only things actually finished and verified. Half-done work is listed as half-done.
Decisions made and why: especially decisions that reversed an earlier approach. The "why" is the part the next session cannot reconstruct.
What is in progress: exact state, which file, which step.
Next steps: concrete and ordered, with the first one precise enough to start typing immediately.
Gotchas: everything that failed and how it was fixed, environment quirks, commands that need specific flags, things that look broken but are fine.
Key paths and commands: the files that matter and the exact commands to run (build, test, deploy, resume).

Step 2: Write the handoff

Default target: START_HERE.md in the project root (or append a dated section to an existing one, newest at the top). Format:

# Start Here: <date>

## TL;DR
Two sentences: where the project is, and the single next action.

## Done this session
## In progress
Exact state, file, and step for each item.

## Next steps (in order)
1. The first one must be executable immediately, with the exact command or file.

## Decisions and why
## Gotchas
What burned time this session, so it does not burn time again.

## Key paths and commands

Step 3: Verify readability cold

Reread the document as someone with zero context: no session shorthand, no "the fix we discussed", no codenames invented mid-conversation. Every reference names its file. If a next step depends on a decision, the decision is in the document too.

On resume

When a new session starts with "where did we leave off": read START_HERE.md, confirm the state still matches reality (files may have changed since), and start on next step 1. Flag divergence instead of following a stale plan.

Rules

Facts only. If tests were not run, the handoff says so.
Never include secrets, tokens, or credentials, even ones seen during the session.
No em dashes in any output.

Output

A START_HERE.md (or dated section) that gets the next session productive in minutes.