mattpocock-handoff
mattpocock/handoff
Five sentences that compact a conversation into a note a fresh agent can pick up.
Compact the current conversation into a handoff document for another agent to pick up. It writes to your temp folder, points at artifacts instead of copying them, and names the skills the next agent should load.
Who it is for
Long sessions whose context is full or drifting, where starting fresh beats compacting in place.
What you get
One markdown file in $TMPDIR (or /tmp) to paste or point the next session at.
A Fresh Context Beats A Full One
Write a handoff document summarising the current conversation so a fresh agent can continue the work.
If the user passed arguments, treat them as a description of what the next session will focus on and tailor the doc accordingly.
The Five Rules, One Per Sentence
The whole body of SKILL.md, split up.
Where
Save to the temporary directory of the user's OS ($TMPDIR, else /tmp; %TEMP% on Windows) - not the current workspace.
Next skills
Include a "suggested skills" section in the document, naming which skills the next agent should call the Skill tool for.
Pointers
Do not duplicate content already captured in other artifacts (specs, plans, ADRs, issues, commits, diffs). Reference them by path or URL instead.
Secrets
Redact any sensitive information, such as API keys, passwords, or personally identifiable information.
Focus
What will the next session be used for? (the argument hint)
One Shipped Skill, One In Progress
Click a part. Quotes are checked against the file named under each.
It Is Prose, So Check The Output
From reading both files at 5beb35b. No scripts ship.
Cost Temp files vanish
/tmp is cleared on reboot on many systems and is local to one machine. Move the file if the next session is tomorrow or elsewhere.
Gap Redaction is on trust
Nothing checks the output for keys. Read it before pasting it anywhere shared.
Gap claude-handoff is not shipped
It lives under skills/in-progress/ and is Claude Code specific, yet skills.sh already lists 420K installs for it.
Copy Suggested skills section
The next agent loads the right skills on turn one instead of rediscovering them.
handoff Writes The Note; pstack Reads The History
| pstack skill | What pstack says it does | How it pairs |
|---|---|---|
recall | “Reconstruct your recent working context from your own chat history” | The other direction: rebuild context from history when nobody wrote a handoff. |
ketchup | “Catch the user up on what changed in this chat since their last message” | A handoff for the human rather than for an agent. |
principle-guard-the-context-window | “Route bulk to subagents; keep summaries in the main thread, not raw payloads.” | The same reason to hand off: keep context small. |
Lauren on why she wrote recall, after losing context between chats:
“was just a way for me to collapse collapse and compress that workflow into a skill.”Lauren Tan (poteto), stream with Matt Pocock, 1:03:10
Read Both Files; They Are Short
- skills/productivity/handoff/SKILL.md
- skills/in-progress/claude-handoff/SKILL.md
- mattpocock/wayfinder: the other way Matt splits work across sessions
- github.com/mattpocock/skills: the repo and its README
- skills.sh/mattpocock/skills: install counts per skill
- Inside pstack: the pstack explainer on this site
- Matt Pocock with poteto, live: the stream quoted here