Handoff
Transferring an agent's context to a new session with no return path, handing off accumulated work.
A handoff is the transfer of an agent's accumulated context from one session to a new one, with no expectation of return. The parent session hands off its work — the decisions made, the context loaded, the state reached — to a successor session that continues from where the first session left off. Unlike a subagent, which reports back to the parent, a handoff severs the connection: the original session closes and a fresh one picks up the work.
The carry mechanism varies by implementation. A written handoff artifact — a document summarizing decisions, remaining tasks, and relevant context — is the most portable approach. An in-memory summary produced by a compaction step can also serve as the transfer vehicle. Some harnesses support direct session-to-session handoff, though this creates tight coupling between sessions that can be fragile.
Common reasons for handoff include role switching — moving from a planning session to an implementation session — kicking off an overnight autonomous run, fanning out to parallel sessions for independent work streams, or freeing up context window space by starting fresh. Handoffs are preferable to pushing through a bloated session when the accumulated context has grown past the point of usefulness.
Open questions include how to automate handoff artifact generation so that context transfer is more reliable and less dependent on the agent's ability to summarize accurately, and whether direct session handoff can be made composable across different agent runtimes and harnesses.
Research this in Signals
Signals turns a topic into a sourced research record you can inspect and rerun. Your first scan is free, and this one starts with Handoff already loaded, so edit it or scan as is.