Handoff prompt

A handoff is a prompt a fresh agent can execute to completion. It knows nothing about this conversation, so everything it needs is in the prompt or reachable from a path the prompt names.

That agent can read the repository. It cannot read this session. So the handoff carries what no file supplies: the decisions made here, the boundary around the work, which source wins when sources disagree, and what done means. Everything a file does supply, the handoff points at rather than restates. A paraphrased spec is a spec that can be wrong; a path is not.

Writing a handoff changes no code. Read the sources, verify the paths, print the prompt.

1. Pin the unit, and what the others are stuck on

One sentence naming what the receiving agent delivers, in the vocabulary of the project. If it does not fit one sentence without an "and", it is more than one handoff: say so, propose the split, and write the first one only.

A batch is the exception, and only for small independent units of the same kind. Five bug fixes touching different files, under one workspace with one set of validation commands, are one handoff with a numbered item list rather than five handoffs restating the same preamble. On a small unit the shared part is most of the document, and paying for it five times is what makes small units not worth dispatching at all. Each item keeps its own identifier, its own boundary, and its own report.

What disqualifies a batch is dependency, not size: where item 2 has to read item 1's diff to know what to do, they are sequenced units and go out separately. The distinction from a unit that needed an "and" is that a batch's items are separately deliverable and separately reportable, and an "and" is one deliverable with entangled halves.

Capture the identifier the project already uses for this unit (ticket key, issue number, milestone) so every later section can name it.

Then, in one line, the end the project is working toward. Then the part that does the work: the relevant open units in the active milestone, and what each blocked one is blocked on. Two or three lines, by identifier.