handoff

name	handoff
description	Write a technical handoff summary of the current work to Memex — a descriptive, summarizing writeup of what you've been doing, the approach and key decisions, where it stands, and what's next — so you (or another agent) can pick the thread back up later. Use at the end of a workday, when wrapping up an involved conversation, or whenever the user says 'hand this off', 'write up where we are', 'summarize this so I can continue later', or 'I'll come back to this'.
argument-hint	[optional: focus / what to hand off]

/handoff — Write a technical handoff summary

You have been invoked via the /handoff slash command.

The user has been working through something — an involved conversation, a piece of implementation, an investigation — and wants to hand the work off to their future self (or another agent). Your job is to write a clear technical summary of where the work stands, good enough that someone picking it up cold could get back up to speed and keep going. Think end-of-day brief or a thorough thread summary, not a status form. Its companion is /continue, which reads the latest handoff back at the start of a later session.

A handoff is a note (memex_add_note) carrying a single handoff tag, so /continue can find it later by recency. It is not a case (it is a summary of work, not a reusable how-to procedure) and not KV (it is not a static preference).

1. Understand the work

Read back over the conversation (and $ARGUMENTS if the user pointed at a focus). You're reconstructing the substance: what the work is actually about, what's been figured out, what was decided and why, what's still open. Capture the technical reality, not a vague gloss — the value of a handoff is that it saves the next session from re-deriving everything.

2. Write the summary

Compose the note as a genuine technical writeup. Lead with prose — explain the work the way you'd brief a capable colleague taking over. These headings are a useful spine, but adapt them to the work rather than filling boxes:

• Summary — what this work is, the approach taken, and the key technical decisions (and the why behind them). This is the bulk of the handoff.
• Where it stands — what's done and working, what's in progress, what's untested or uncertain.
• Next steps — the concrete threads to pick up, specific enough to act on.
• Key references — the files, branches, PRs, commands, and links that anchor the work.

Then set the note fields:

• title: Handoff: <short descriptor of the work> — recognizable at a glance.
• description: ONE crisp sentence naming the work and where it stands — the note's one-line gist (surfaced in memex_note_search results). Make it stand on its own (e.g. "Vault-routing wired through the CLI and green; the alembic migration for the new column is the next step."). NOTE: /continue builds its candidate previews from the note's extracted summaries (memex_list_notes returns no description field), so also keep the body's Summary section self-contained — that is what /continue actually renders.
• author: "claude-code".
• tags: ["handoff"]. The plugin auto-injects ambient tags (surface:claude-code, session:*, project:*, git:*, …) — project:* is what scopes the handoff to this repo, so don't repeat or hand-set them.
• note_key: Do NOT set this. The plugin derives it from the Claude Code session id so repeated /handoffs in the same session upsert. Passing an explicit note_key would break that anchoring.

3. Save

Call memex_add_note(...) with the fields above. The plugin defaults background: true, which is right — extraction runs async and /continue finds the note by tag immediately regardless.

Because this note carries the handoff tag, the plugin also anchors it to the current Claude Code session. Running /handoff again in the same session (including after claude --resume <SESSION-ID>) updates the same note rather than creating a duplicate, so the latest handoff always wins. Disjoint claude sessions keep separate handoffs.

4. Stay on one plane

A handoff summarizes where the work is, not how to do a recurring task — so do NOT also memex_case_submit it. If, separately, the session produced a genuinely reusable how-to worth getting back next time, mention the user can run /case for it.

5. Confirm

State the handoff note's title in one line and that /continue will surface it at the start of the next session.