A Claude Code skill that writes a comprehensive HANDOFF.md at your repo root, so the next chat can resume cold - with zero memory of this one - without re-deriving everything from scratch.
Most "wrap up the session" notes are terse and written from recall, so they drift from what actually happened. This skill does two things differently:
- It pulls real git data before writing a word. Commit hashes, branch state, dirty files, the existing handoff - ground truth, not memory.
- It keeps the section everyone skips: what failed or got stuck. That is usually the most valuable part, because it stops the next session repeating a mistake that already cost time once.
Seven sections, in this order:
- Session date and headline - what this session was about, in one line.
- What we did - the chronological story of the session, picking up from the last handoff.
- What we shipped - concrete, verifiable results: commits, deploys, files changed.
- What we failed or got stuck on - dead ends, rejected approaches, unfixed bugs.
- What we can learn - durable lessons and gotchas worth carrying forward.
- Where things stand now - git state, what is decided vs. still open.
- Next session - start here - explicit first steps for the next chat.
Copy the session-handoff folder into your skills directory:
- Personal (all projects):
~/.claude/skills/session-handoff/ - Project (this repo only, shared with the team):
.claude/skills/session-handoff/
The folder just needs to contain SKILL.md. That is the whole skill.
It triggers on natural language - no slash command needed. Say any of:
- "update the handoff"
- "write the handoff"
- "wrap up this session"
- "where did we leave off"
...or anything that reads as closing out a work session. Claude Code picks it up from the description.
HANDOFF.md is transient session state, not documentation, so the skill keeps it out of git history - it belongs in .gitignore. It gets rewritten every session; committing it would only churn the log.
The handoff is what happened this session. For facts that are permanently true - your voice, your hard rules, a standing constraint - there is a companion project that gives Claude a durable memory: claude-memory. The two are a pair - handoff is transient, memory is durable - and this skill promotes durable facts up to it instead of burying them in a note that gets pruned.
MIT