agent-handoff

To hand off in-progress work without hallucination, generate a structured handoff payload that captures artifacts, decisions with rationales, constraints as prohibitions, open questions, a single next step, and precise context anchors. This prevents successor agents from re-litigating previous work.

A state payload for AI agent handoffs is a structured schema containing artifacts, decisions, constraints, and context anchors. You need one when transferring in-progress tasks across multi-agent systems or team boundaries to ensure no context is lost.

To create context anchors, you reference specific file paths and line ranges within the handoff payload. This surgical pointing ensures the successor agent focuses only on relevant code sections, avoiding broad tangents and unnecessary context processing.

Yes, you can leave sections empty in the handoff schema, but you must include every required section by using an empty array [] for missing fields. This ensures the payload remains structurally valid while explicitly indicating no data exists for that category.

The best way to structure constraints in an agent handoff payload is to define them as explicit prohibitions. This clearly communicates boundaries and forbidden actions to the successor agent, preventing it from taking actions that violate project rules.

No, generating a handoff schema does not require any external dependencies or frameworks. It is a dependency-free process that produces a structured JSON payload following the schema requirements, making it compatible with any multi-agent system.