What are the seven required fields?
The Handover Continuity Record is intentionally compact enough to complete at every meaningful checkpoint and explicit enough for a different actor to resume.
- Objective: desired outcome and acceptance criteria.
- Current state: complete, in progress, blocked, and unverified work.
- Decisions: choices already made with concise rationale.
- Evidence: files, queries, outputs, links, and observations.
- Constraints: permissions, safety rules, deadlines, budgets, and exclusions.
- Next action: the smallest concrete continuation step.
- Ownership: the person or agent responsible for that step.
What supporting material should be attached?
Attach the source material needed to verify the state instead of flattening it into prose. Handover records can carry Markdown, HTML, SQL, source code, JSON, images, and other artifacts as immutable revision files.
What should never be included?
Do not include passwords, API tokens, private keys, session cookies, unnecessary personal data, or hidden chain-of-thought. Refer to secrets by their approved environment-variable or secret-manager name, and include only reasoning summaries needed to justify a decision.
How detailed should the record be?
Use the minimum detail that lets a new actor reproduce the important conclusions and take the next action without asking the original author to reconstruct the task. Link or attach deep evidence; keep the top-level record oriented around continuation.
How do you know a handoff is complete?
A handoff is complete when a receiving actor can state what success means, what changed, what remains uncertain, where the evidence lives, what constraints apply, and what to do next. The downloadable checklist provides a fast review before publishing.
Primary references