Handoff & takeover

A handoff lets you stop a piece of work in one place and resume it elsewhere — in a fresh session, or in a completely different tool — without re-explaining everything. One agent writes a structured summary; another reads it back and carries on. This is what makes The Librarian a cross-tool layer rather than just per-tool memory.

Handing work off

When you are about to stop, tell your agent to hand off. You can use the /handoff command where it exists, or just say “hand this off” or “we’re done for now” — both do the same thing. The agent writes a handoff document with five fixed sections:

• Start & intent — what you set out to do.
• Journey — what happened along the way.
• Current state — where things stand right now.
• What’s left — the remaining work.
• Open questions — anything undecided.

All five are required — the system refuses a document missing any of them, which is what keeps handoffs genuinely useful. The agent saves it and returns an id you can reference later.

Picking work back up

In the new session or tool, tell the agent to take over. Use /takeover, or say “pick up where I left off” or “what was I doing?”. The agent lists the handoffs waiting for the current project, you choose one, and it claims it and continues from where the document leaves off.

Claiming is one-shot and atomic: only one agent can claim a given handoff. If two try at once, the loser is simply told who already has it — so work is never accidentally picked up twice.

Reading handoffs yourself

You can read any handoff in the dashboard’s Handoffs page — the document and all its details. Note the dashboard is read-only for handoffs: claiming is something agents do, because claiming is part of resuming the work.

Handoffs vs memories

They are different tools for different jobs:

• A handoff describes in-progress work and is claimed exactly once. It is evidence of where you were, not a permanent fact.
• A memory is a durable fact you want to keep. To promote something you learned during the work into lasting memory, use “save what we learned” (the /learn flow) instead.

A note on private mode

If you are in private mode, handing off writes to the server, so the agent will ask you to confirm before it saves anything.