Every time work moves from one session to another — or from the main agent to a subagent, a fresh agent, or in real life from you to a teammate — that’s a handoff. With AI coding agents handoffs happen often and sometimes invisibly: auto-compaction firing, work being given to a subagent — or you starting a fresh session (e.g. with /clear) after a plan or spec has been written.
The catch here: the receiver can’t ask the sender what it meant, so any handoff artifact has to stand on its own. For example a good handoff should record not just the what, but also the why, otherwise the next session might reopen settled questions.
Here’s a timing trick to try: don’t wait for auto-compaction to rescue you — it fires when the context is nearly full, which is when the model is at its least sharp. Hand off before you hit the wall. When a session gets heavy, run /compact focus on the schema decisions to steer what survives.
An expert trick is to have a ready made instruction (or perhaps even a skill) that puts the handoff-information in a file you can review, and even bring from one coding agent to another (Running out of Claude Code-credits? Create a handoff doc and bring it into Copilot CLI).
Bonus: a fresh session with a good brief has no sunk-cost bias — it is not confused by dead ends and won’t hold on to what a tired session kept defending.
đź’ˇ Try this: tell your agent: “Write a handoff doc for a fresh session that knows nothing about this work.” (or try one of the skills below)
đź”— Anthropic on session management
đź”— Matt Pocock’s lightweight /handoff skill
đź”— ToolMonster’s cross-agent handoff
đź”— Softaworks’ Session Handoff
How do you carry context between sessions?
🟢 I make sure I have reviewable handoff docs / compact deliberately
🟡 I just start over and re-explain or let auto-compaction deal with it
đź”´ I often lose context and feel it
⚪ Haven’t hit this yet
Got a handoff trick you like?