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Tars now ships agent skills next to its routines, in skills/. A routine is a prompt you hand to a scheduled task; a skill is Markdown the agent loads on its own when the work matches it.
handoff
The first one covers both sides of a context boundary — a new session, a /clear, a fresh worktree, a subagent returning to its coordinator, a different model, or a human picking up where an agent stopped.
- Writing. Eight sections — Objective, State, Verify-before-you-build, Decisions, Rejected, Open questions, Next action, Pointers — and you delete the empty ones instead of writing "N/A". Two conventions carry most of the value: mark provenance inline (
(verified: pnpm test, 14:20)vs(assumed)), and hand over a verification command rather than a status claim, because an agent grading its own output is the weakest signal in the document. - Reading. A received handoff is a claim from a prior session, not ground truth. Orient, run the verify step, reconcile against live state — live state wins — and only then start new work.
- The one rule. Carry what cannot be re-derived; point at everything else. Why a decision went the way it did, the dead ends and why they died, constraints stated only in conversation, environment quirks learned the hard way. Anything sitting in git, the test suite, or a PR gets a pointer.
It also drops the habits that stopped helping: CRITICAL:/YOU MUST padding, prescribed ten-step scripts, example walls, and the inherited "context is nearly full, wrap up fast" panic — all of which make a Claude 5 receiver worse, not more careful.
Why it belongs in a memory repo
The brain and a handoff split the same problem. The graph holds what stays true; the handoff holds what is only true right now — the half-finished migration, the command that proves it, the dead end not to re-run. So the skill writes durable facts into the brain via the memory_* tools and keeps the artifact itself disposable, which is the repo's "brain over Markdown" rule rather than an exception to it.
Install
cp -r skills/handoff ~/.claude/skills/No code, no dependencies — Markdown with name and description frontmatter. Other hosts: point yours at skills/handoff/SKILL.md.