Handoff

Definition

A handoff is passing an unfinished task from one AI coding agent or chat to another along with the context the new one needs to carry on: what was asked, what was done, and the current state of the code.

Also called: hand-off, agent handoff, context handoff.

People hand off work when one agent is close to its plan limit, when another tool is better at the next step, or when a conversation has grown too long to stay focused. A fresh agent knows nothing about the earlier chat, so everything it needs has to travel with the task.

What a useful handoff carries

• The goal, and decisions already made (with why).
• What's finished and what's left.
• The repository's state: branch, uncommitted changes, recent commits, open pull requests.
• A clear instruction for the next step.

Common ways without a dedicated tool are asking the agent to write a summary file, or committing and pushing a branch for the next agent to pick up. Some tools move work within their own product, such as Claude Code's --teleport pulling a cloud session into the terminal. A handoff is different from a fork, which branches the same conversation within one app. Handoff notes should be read as information, not as new instructions.

In Pairbar

⋯ → Continue → Hand off to Codex / Claude writes a handoff file to ~/.pairbar/handoffs, readable only by you and deleted after 14 days. It holds the whole conversation (single messages over 8,000 characters are shortened) plus git status, the uncommitted diff, recent commits, branch and PRs. The composer opens on the other app with a 📎 Handoff chip; the new chat is told to read the file first, as information rather than instructions. See Handoff.