Session Handoff

The practice of packaging the useful state from a Claude Code session into a concise handoff document before clearing context or moving work into a new session.

Key points

• A good handoff preserves the goal, current state, decisions made, files touched, open risks, and next actions [src-011].
• It avoids carrying the full conversation history forward, which is the main driver of context bloat and context-rot [src-011].
• Handoffs are useful mid-project when a session is getting long but the work is not finished [src-011].
• session-chaining is the planned, multi-session version of the same discipline: each session produces the input artifact for the next one [src-011].

Related entities

• claude-code — runtime where the handoff is generated and consumed

Related concepts

• session-chaining — structured sequence of handoff-driven sessions
• context-management — broader discipline
• context-rot — problem the handoff avoids

Source references

• [src-011] Nate Herk — Claude Code power features cluster (2026-04-20 to 2026-04-27)