[0] https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aadam-s%2Fintercept%20hand...
That sounded like a nice idea, so I made it effortless beyond typing /handoff.
The generated docs turned out to be really handy for me personally, so I kept using it, and committed them into my project as they're generated.
I see. So this isn't as scary. Claude is helping me understand how to use it properly.
Unless you're a true and invested believer of souls, free will, and other spiritualistic nonsense (or have a vested political affiliation to pretend so), it should be tautological that everything you read and experience biases you. LLM output then is no different.
If you are a believer, then either nothing ever did, or LLMs are special in some way, or everything else is. Which just doesn't make sense to me.
[0] It's jarring to observe the boundaries of one's agency, sure, but LLMs are really nothing special in this way. For example, I somewhat frequently catch myself using words and phrases I saw earlier during the day elsewhere, even if I did not process them consciously.
It definitely adds a layer of cognitive load, in wrangling/shepherding/accomodating/accepting the unpredictable personalities and stochastic behaviors of the agents. It has strong default behaviors for certain small tasks, and where humans would eventually habituate prescribed procedures/requirements, the LLM's never really internalize my preferences. In that way, they are more like contractors than employees.
E.g., a hammer doesn't do anything, and neither does a lawnmower. It would be silly to argue (just because these tools are static objects doing nothing in the absence of direct human involvement) that those tools don't have a very clear value.
When people use other people like tools, i.e. use them to enable themselves to accomplish something, do those people cease to do things as well? Or is that not a terminology you recognize as sensible maybe?
I appreciate that for some people the verb "do" is evidently human(?) exclusive, I just struggle to wrap my head around why. Or is this an animate vs. inanimate thing, so animals operating tools also do things in your view?
How do you phrase things like "this API consumes that kind of data" in your day to day?
To be clear, I am not the person you were originally replying to. I personally don't care much for the terminology semantics of whether we should say "hammers do things" (with the opponents claiming it to be incorrect, since hammers cannot do anything on their own). I am more than happy to use whichever of the two terms the majority agrees upon to be the most sensible, as long as everyone agrees on the actual meaning of it.
> I appreciate that for some people the verb "do" is evidently human(?) exclusive, I just struggle to wrap my head around why. Or is this an animate vs. inanimate thing, so animals operating tools also do things in your view?
To me, it isn't human-exclusive. I just thought that in the context of this specific comment thread, the user you originally replied to used it as a human-exclusive term, so I tried explaining in my reply how they (most likely) used it. For me, I just use whichever term that I feel makes the most sense to use in the context, and then clarify the exact details (in case I suspect the audience to have a number of people who might use the term differently).
> How do you phrase things like "this API consumes that kind of data" in your day to day?
I would use it the exact way you phrased it, "this API consumes that kind of data", because I don't think anyone in the audience would be confused or unclear about what that actually means (depends on the context ofc). Imo it wouldn't be wrong to say "this API receives that kind of data as input" either, but it feels too verbose and awkward to actually use.
To me, what's essential for any "doing" to happen is an entity, a causative relationship, and an occurrence. So a lawnmower can absolutely mow the lawn, but also the wind can shape a canyon.
In a reference frame where a lawnmower cannot mow independently because humans designed it or operate it, humans cannot do anything independently either. Which is something I absolutely do agree with by the way, but then either everything is one big entity, or this is not a salient approach to segmenting entities. Which is then something I also agree with.
And so I consider the lawnmower its own entity, the person operating or designing it their own entity, and just evaluate the process accordingly. The person operating the lawnmower has a lot of control on where the lawnmower goes and whether it is on, the lawnmower has a lot of control over the shape of the grass, and the designer of the lawnmower has a lot of control over what shapes can the lawnmower hope to create.
Clearly they then have more logic applied, where they segment humans (or tools) in this a more special way. I wanted to probe into that further, because the only such labeling I can think of is spiritualistic and anthropocentric. I don't find such a model reasonable or interesting, but maybe they have some other rationale that I might. Especially so, because to me claiming that a given entity "does things" is not assigning it a soul, a free will, or some other spiritualistic quality, since I don't even recognize those as existing (and thus take great issue with the unspoken assumption that I do, or that people like me do).
The next best thing I can maybe think of is to consider the size of the given entity's internal state, and its entropy with relation to the occurred causative action and its environment. This is because that's quite literally how one entity would be independent of another, while being very selective about a given action. But then LLMs, just like humans, got plenty of this, much unlike a hammer or a lawnmower. So that doesn't really fit their segmentation either. LLMs have a lot less of it, but still hopelessly more than any virtual or physical tool ever conceived prior. The closest anything comes (very non-coincidentally) are vector and graph databases, but then those only respond to very specific, grammar-abiding queries, not arbitrary series of symbols.
I am not disagreeing with you in the slightest, I feel like this is just a linguistic semantics thing. And I, personally, don't care how people use those words, as long as we are on the same page about the actual meaning of what was said. And, in this case, I feel like we are fully on the same page.
For example, "let's gate the new logic behind a feature flag".
* update our architecture.md and other key md files in folders affected by updates and learnings in this session. * update claude.md with changes in workflows/tooling/conventions (not project summaries) * commit
It's been pretty good so far. Nothing fancy. Recently I also asked to keep memories within the repo itself instead of in ~/.claude.
Only downside is it is slow but keeps enough to pass the baton. May be "handoff" would have been a better name!
Ok, here you go: https://gist.github.com/shawwn/56d9f2e3f8f662825c977e6e5d0bf...
Installation steps:
- In your project, download https://gist.github.com/shawwn/56d9f2e3f8f662825c977e6e5d0bf... into .claude/commands/handoff.md
- In your project's CLAUDE.md file, put "Read `docs/agents/handoff/*.md` for context."
Usage:
- Whenever you've finished a feature, done a coherent "thing", or otherwise want to document all the stuff that's in your current session, type /handoff. It'll generate a file named e.g. docs/agents/handoff/2026-03-30-001-whatever-you-did.md. It'll ask you if you like the name, and you can say "yes" or "yes, and make sure you go into detail about X" or whatever else you want the handoff to specifically include info about.
- Optionally, type "/rename 2026-03-23-001-whatever-you-did" into claude, followed by "/exit" and then "claude" to re-open a fresh session. (You can resume the previous session with "claude 2026-03-23-001-whatever-you-did". On the other hand, I've never actually needed to resume a previous session, so you could just ignore this step entirely; just /exit then type claude.)
Here's an example so you can see why I like the system. I was working on a little blockchain visualizer. At the end of the session I typed /handoff, and this was the result:
- docs/agents/handoff/2026-03-24-001-brownie-viz-graph-interactivity.md: https://gist.github.com/shawwn/29ed856d020a0131830aec6b3bc29...
The filename convention stuff was just personal preference. You can tell it to store the docs however you want to. I just like date-prefixed names because it gives a nice history of what I've done. https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5a79b929-49ee-461...
Try to do a /handoff before your conversation gets compacted, not after. The whole point is to be a permanent record of key decisions from your session. Claude's compaction theoretically preserves all of these details, so /handoff will still work after a compaction, but it might not be as detailed as it otherwise would have been.
"write a summary handoff md in ./planning for a fresh convo"
and it's generally good enough), but maybe a skill like you've done would save some typing, hmm
My ./planning directory is getting pretty big, though!
It wasn’t anything important. I appreciate you pointing that out though.
I just keep old sessions for keepsake. No reason really. I thought maybe I’d want them for some reason but never did.
The docs are the important part. It helps me (and future sessions) understand old decisions.
I've got a separate script which parses the jsonl files that claude creates for sessions and indexes them in a local database for longer term searchability. A number of times I've found myself needing some detail I knew existed in some conversation history, but CC is pretty bad and slow at searching through the flat files for relevant content. This makes that process much faster and more consistent. Again, this is due to my lack of discipline with contexts. I'll be working with my recipe planner context and have a random idea that I just iterate with right there. Later I'll never remember that idea started from the recipe context. With this setup I don't have to.
Your system is great and I do similar, my problem is I have a bunch of sessions and forget to 'handoff'.
The clawbots handle this automatically with journals to save knowledge/memory.