handofflisted

# Handoff — conscious session handoff before context loss Context loss is lossy and narrative-biased. Auto-compaction and `/clear` keep what reads like a story and drop what reads like scaffolding — the next action, the failed approaches, the WHY behind a half-made decision. A conscious handoff is the antidote: you decide what survives instead of letting the summarizer decide for you. The cost is a few minutes of deliberate writing now; the failure it prevents — a fresh session re-burning hours on a dead end the last session already ruled out — costs hours, repeatedly. ## Route each piece of state to its one home One piece of state, one home. Putting state in the wrong home (or two homes) is where handoffs rot. - **Durable fact** — a footgun learned, a user preference, a decision rationale → a **memory file**. Lead with the rule, then the WHY, then how-to-apply (*"never X — because Y — fires when Z"*). Keep it short; do not dump the session narrative into memory — that buries the rule and defeats lazy-loading. - **Plan progress** — what's done, what's next, conformance status → the owning **plan or spec doc's resume banner / conformance matrix**, never memory. Writing *"finished step 3"* into memory duplicates the plan and creates two sources of truth that drift. Memory holds at most a one-line pointer. - **Orphan WIP** — work in flight with no natural home → an **ephemeral handoff doc** (under the project's handoffs directory, dated-and-slugged) plus a one-line pointer f