/handoff -- Frozen Context Snapshots (CR-033)

A conversation often surfaces a bounded subject that belongs to different work: a topic a colleague should hear about, a positioning question that belongs to a company document, a commitment whose execution is a separate job.

/handoff writes that subject to <vault>/.handoff/ as a frozen, self-contained snapshot — everything the receiving session needs, and nothing else.

The defining property: nothing picks it up. No skill parses, indexes, summarises, sweeps or lints it. It generates no task, appears in no dashboard, and is never auto-archived. A human opens it and starts new work from it. That is the only way it moves.

Isolation is the feature. The receiving session gets exactly one subject with no surrounding context — no links to chase, no adjacent threads bleeding in, no inherited assumptions.

When to use it

Write a snapshot when all of these hold:

• The subject is bounded — it can be stated without the rest of the conversation
• It belongs to different work than the session that produced it
• Someone will act on it later, in a separate session or a separate head
• It benefits from arriving clean — without the source conversation's context

When NOT to use it

A snapshot that would need updating next week is the wrong artefact — that is a living document.

Contract

Six rules. They are the skill.

1. Frozen. Written once. Never updated as the world changes; it records what was true when captured. If the situation moves materially, write a new snapshot — do not edit the old one.
2. Self-contained. No wikilinks, no relative paths, no references to vault files. A reader with no vault access must be able to act on it.
3. Bounded. One subject per snapshot. Three separable subjects yield three snapshots.
4. Not indexed. No CHANGELOG entry, no README index, no _insights.yaml, no task generated.
5. Read on explicit request only. Opened because the user asked for it by name — never as part of a scan.
6. Not archived. Already frozen; archiving is a no-op.

For all other skills, .handoff/ does not exist. /ops (including /ops check), /insights and /analytics must skip it the way they skip .archive/ — regardless of urgency, sensitivity, or what the file says.

Naming

.handoff/YYMMDD-handoff-<subject-slug>.md

Slug rules follow the vault's general naming contract: YYMMDD- prefix always, the handoff role keyword always, Swedish characters preserved (förberedelse, not forberedelse). The subject slug names the subject, not the source meeting — the receiving session searches by topic.

Good: 260828-handoff-medtech-transkribering-journalskrivning.md Bad: 260828-handoff-marc-motet.md (names the source, not the subject)

Document structure

# Handoff snapshot: [subject]

**{strings.handoff.captured}:** YYYY-MM-DD · **{strings.handoff.source}:** [conversation, date, duration]
**{strings.handoff.scope}:** [what this covers -- and explicitly, what it does not]

> **{strings.handoff.frozen_marker}** Self-contained by design: no links into the vault,
> not indexed anywhere, not referenced by any living document. What is written here is what
> was true on the day -- it is not maintained and does not track later changes.

---

## 1. [First substantive section]

## 2. [Second]

## N. [What was still open / undecided at capture time]

Numbered sections. A receiving session refers to "section 4" without ambiguity.

Close with what was open. The most useful final section is what had not been decided when the snapshot was taken — it tells the receiving session where its work begins.

Write for a cold reader. Assume no knowledge of the source conversation, the people in it, or the vault. Spell out roles on first mention. Where a figure came from a specific claim, say so.

Confidentiality boundary

Where the content came from a confidential conversation, the snapshot carries an explicit boundary block at the top, before any content:

> ## {strings.handoff.confidentiality_header} -- READ BEFORE USE
>
> [Where this came from, in one sentence.]
>
> **May be shared onward:** [the general signal -- market state, category movement,
> a regulatory fact -- that the receiver should know regardless of source.]
>
> **May NOT be shared onward:** [the counterpart's own business -- terms, timing,
> commercial arrangements, and that they were the source.]
>
> **Naming:** [whether the source may be named, and what to do if the receiver wants
> to be connected.]

This is where the snapshot outperforms every other home: the constraint travels with the content, written while the source is still clear. A receiving session has the boundary in front of it instead of inferring it.

Anonymise inside the body too — write "a market-leading vendor" rather than the name when the name is the restricted part. A snapshot that needs a boundary block and leaks the identity in section 3 has failed.

Subcommands

/handoff <subject> (default)

Capture the named subject from the current conversation.

1. Bound the subject. Identify what belongs and — explicitly — what does not. State the boundary back to the user before writing.
2. Check the confidentiality question. Did any of this come from a confidential source? If yes, draft the boundary block and ask the user to confirm it before writing. Never guess where the line falls.
3. Draft self-contained. Strip every vault link. Expand every reference that assumed the source conversation.
4. Write to .handoff/YYMMDD-handoff-<slug>.md.
5. Report the path and nothing else. No CHANGELOG, no task, no index entry.

If the conversation yields several separable subjects, say so and offer one snapshot each — do not merge them.

/handoff list

List snapshots: filename, capture date, subject line. Filenames and headings only — never open or summarise contents.

/handoff read <name>

Open a named snapshot. This is the explicit request the read-lock requires. Partial name matching is fine; if ambiguous, list matches and ask.

/handoff help

Show subcommands and the six contract rules.

Behaviour rules

• Never write a snapshot unasked. Offering is fine ("this looks like it belongs to different work — snapshot it?"); writing without being asked is not.
• Never update an existing snapshot. Correcting a typo is acceptable. Adding new information is not — that is a new snapshot.
• Never link a snapshot from a living document. If a living document needs to point at the subject, it states the subject in its own words.
• Never generate a task from a snapshot. The user decides whether the subject becomes work. A snapshot that silently spawns a task has broken the non-delivery property.
• Never read .handoff/ during a scan. Not for context gathering, not for cross-references (/preparation Step 2.5), not for insight extraction, not for sweeps.

Out of scope

• Automation. Nothing schedules, chases or reminds. A deadline belongs in a task that names the subject; the snapshot stays inert.
• Dashboards. Surfacing handoffs in a daily view re-couples them to the flow they were extracted from.
• Synthesis. .knowledge/ (CR-027) synthesises across the corpus and is maintained. Handoffs are point-in-time and are not.
• Delivery. A snapshot is never sent. If material is going to a person, that is _outbox/.

String Resolution

Template strings marked {strings.handoff.*} resolve per the standard order: config strings -> language-matched defaults -> hardcoded fallback.

Swedish output follows the vault's swedish_chars: strict rule — å, ä and ö in every word that needs them, in headings, body and filename slug alike.