handoff

name	handoff
description	Engineering hand-off packaging skill — turns a refined scope brief into a self-contained, liftable engineering hand-off artifact that seeds the engineer agent's design phase. Produces a separate liftable artifact; stand-alone; points to the engineer agent but never invokes it.

Handoff Skill

Package a refined scope brief into a self-contained, liftable engineering hand-off — the bridge artifact between the product work-shaping funnel and the engineering lifecycle. This is the third and final stage of the product funnel: a human lifts this artifact and pastes it into the engineer agent to seed its design/research phase.

Always announce at start: "I'm using the handoff skill to package this for engineering."

Audience: the technical product manager (or whoever owns the hand-off), preparing work for engineering pickup.

Input

A refined scope brief (the output of the refine skill):

• In-repo: the matured file at docs/scopes/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>.md.
• Otherwise: an inline refined brief pasted into the conversation.

If the input has not been refined yet (no system considerations, no authoritative scope, no resolved open questions), say so and recommend running the refine skill first. Do not fabricate engineering detail — a hand-off is a repackaging of refined material, not a place to invent new scope.

Behavior

Produce a separate, self-contained artifact — distinct from the scope/refine document so a human can lift just this package into the engineer agent or a ticket without carrying the stakeholder-scope history. Pull from the refined brief; do not re-derive or expand scope.

Apply the same right-sizing discipline as the rest of the funnel: bounded, anti-bloat, no implementation detail (no code, no file paths, no task decomposition — those are the engineer lifecycle's job). The hand-off seeds engineering; it is not the plan.

The Hand-Off Artifact

A bounded, engineering-seed-shaped package. Bias short — it should read as a clean statement of work that the engineer agent's researcher phase can pick up directly.

Section	Purpose
Summary	2–4 sentences — what this work is, in engineering-relevant terms
Goal / Outcome	The outcome engineering is being asked to achieve
Authoritative Scope	In scope / out of scope, carried from the refined brief (the authoritative determination, not the stakeholder's soft understanding)
Key Constraints & System Considerations	The system boundaries and constraints engineering must respect, from refinement
Acceptance Criteria	How completion is judged — observable, testable where possible
Open Risks / Spikes	Anything still flagged needs-spike or deferred from refinement, so engineering knows the known unknowns up front
Suggested Ticket(s)	One or more ticket-ready items if the refined brief was split; otherwise a single ticket framing

If the refined brief was broken into multiple tickets, the hand-off may produce one package per ticket, or one package listing the ticket set — match the refined breakdown; do not introduce a new decomposition.

Self-Calibration Pass

After drafting, review against these anti-patterns and trim or flag before presenting:

1. Scope invention — the hand-off contains scope, constraints, or criteria not present in (or derivable from) the refined brief. Strip it; a hand-off repackages, it does not expand.
2. Implementation leakage — the package prescribes how to build (code, file paths, task steps). Remove it; that is the engineer lifecycle's job.
3. Ballooning — the package has grown past a clean, digestible statement of work. Trim.
4. Unresolved hand-off — risks/spikes left implicit. Surface every known unknown explicitly under Open Risks / Spikes.

Persistence (Environment-Adaptive)

Inline rendering is the canonical output in every environment — always render the full hand-off artifact in the conversation.

Then, only if a repository working directory is available:

• Write a new, separate file at docs/handoffs/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>.md (note the plural handoffs, consistent with docs/scopes/, docs/specs/, and docs/plans/). Unlike refine, this is a distinct artifact — the whole point is a liftable package, so it does NOT edit the scope document in place.
• Commit it so the hand-off is captured in git history alongside the scope/refine document it derives from.
• If docs/ is gitignored, keep the file as a local working artifact (still render inline).

If no repository working directory is available (e.g., a Claude organizational skill), inline is the sole output — the user copies the package into their ticket system or the engineer agent.

Next Step

Always end the hand-off artifact with this pointer (a pointer, not a handoff — this skill never invokes another agent):

Ready for engineering — paste this package into the engineer agent to begin design/planning.

Key Principles

• Repackage, don't expand — everything traces back to the refined brief
• Self-contained and liftable — no dependency on the scope document's history
• No implementation detail — seed the engineer lifecycle, don't pre-empt it
• Same right-sizing discipline — a clean statement of work, not a dump
• Stand-alone — render inline always, write a separate file in-repo when possible, never invoke another agent