/handover

name: handover
description: Use when handing finished work over to code review — writing a PR description or packaging a change for review by a human, an agent, or both.
license: MIT
metadata:
  version: "0.11"

Handover

Package a finished change so its reviewers never reconstruct intent from the diff. Write for a reviewer holding the diff and nothing else — no planning docs, no session, no knowledge that either exists.

Resolve the task

The input is any partial reference — ticket id, slug, a planning artifact's path — or nothing, meaning the session's task; in a fresh session, infer it from branch name and recent commits. Resolve it to the task's **planning home**: its `<id>-<slug>/` directory (no ticket → no id) in the project's planning directory, or its flat `<id>-<slug>.*` files in a shared family directory. One clear match → proceed, stating the home and artifacts found. Inferred, or several candidates (`-vN`, …) → confirm first. An explicit reference matching nothing local → stop and ask; never guess.

Gather

Read these, skipping what doesn't exist:

1. **Task artifacts** — every `<id>-<slug>*.md` in the planning home: ticket, requirements, plan, decisions log, prior review and handover rounds, whatever else matches. 2. **Related tickets** — one hop only: parent (climbing higher only past thin containers — a parent that is only a title and a child list), direct predecessors/successors, explicit relations, family-directory siblings; never expand their own relations. Local `.TICKET.md`s first; fetch from the tracker only when a relation has no local file and looks load-bearing for a why — in doubt whether to fetch, ask. 3. **The session**, when it produced the change: decisions, pivots, constraints. 4. **The diff** from the merge base with the target to `HEAD`, plus commit subjects. Target: the one a prior review or handover round records, else the open PR's base, else the auto-detected default branch — of the `upstream` remote when one exists, else of `origin`, via `git ls-remote --symref <remote> HEAD`; that failing (e.g. offline), the sole existing candidate among `main`, `master`, `develop`/`development`, preferring `upstream`'s remote-tracking ref, then `origin`'s, then the local branch; none or ambiguous → ask. State it and `git fetch` its remote (local-only target → nothing to fetch; a failed fetch → ask, never diff stale refs). No merge base → `git fetch --unshallow` and retry, else ask — never diff against the target itself. An empty diff from the merge base → probably a wrong target: say so and ask, never match planned items against it. Before diffing, name uncommitted changes, untracked included, and ask which belong: the author commits those first; the rest stays out. 5. **PR conventions** — the repo's PR template, wherever the forge looks for one (e.g. root, `.github/`, `docs/`; several → ask the author which), and any project skill for PR descriptions.

An earlier artifact — a ticket review, a prior round — counts only where nothing later settled the point.

Each source once, no deeper than the artifact needs: skim the diff whole; deep-read only the files you will name in the *Review guide*; for a visual, read just the function, component or directory it draws; never rebuild history commit by commit — which commit changed what is the diff's job, not yours.

Then match the plan's steps and acceptance criteria against the diff both ways — planned but absent, present but unplanned. Done when every source is read or confirmed absent and every planned item is matched against a non-empty diff.

Source every claim

State a "why", or any other claim about the change, only where a source gives it. Silence is not a source: never infer a fact from what the diff and docs leave unsaid ("untested so far", "nobody calls this"). A deviation nothing explains is asked of the author once; unanswered or unaskable, it ships flagged in plain words ("nothing records why — worth confirming"), since it may be an unintentional gap rather than a decision. Sourcing is your gate, not the reviewer's reading: it decides what you may write, and never appears in the text. When not sure, always ask. Never guess.

The artifact

`<id>-<slug>.HANDOVER.md` in the planning home, same base as the task's other artifacts; already taken → `<id>-<slug>.HANDOVER-2.md`, `-3`, … — never overwrite. No planning home → `<id>-<slug>/` in the project's planning directory (none evident → `.agents/plans/`), id and slug derived from branch name and changes, stating the choice. The file's first line is the PR title in the repo's commit convention (`# <title>`); the body follows, paste-ready as the PR description, and stands alone:

• **Mention only what the reviewer can open** — a tracker URL, or a file you verified is committed

on the branch. Everything else — planning docs, decisions log, session, commit hashes — is neither linked nor named: write what it says ("this was meant to …"), never where it says it. A colleague's clarification is stated as what it settled, grounded in something openable ("the goal is X, which <ticket URL> needs"); naming the colleague is the last resort.

• **Related tickets go unmentioned** unless a why depends on one ("built this way to prepare

for <X>") — then cite its tracker URL.

• **Under a screen**, ~400 words; the caps below are limits, not targets.
• **A visual where the diff hides the change's shape** — a flow across several files, a moved or

split layout, a reordered call chain — one per point, never a second for the same one. The smallest shape that makes the point, from [visuals.md](visuals.md), placed right under the line it supports; it takes screen, not words. A visual is a claim: every node and `+`/`-` line is in the diff or a source.

• **Never hard-wrap**: forges (e.g. GitHub) render newlines in PR bodies as line breaks — one

line per paragraph or bullet.

• **Plain reviewer-facing wording