Handoff

Handoff to a fresh Dave session

/handoff starts a new Dave agentic session in the current worktree and seeds it with the next task, so this session can wrap up while a fresh one picks up with clean context. It's a single agentium spawn call (see the agentium skill): one command spawns a sibling on this host + cwd, waits for it to come up, and delivers the task as its first message.

1. Decide the task

The new session inherits zero context from this conversation, so the task has to be a self-contained prompt: what to build, the full headway:board/word-id card ref if there is one, and any constraint the fresh agent can't infer from the repo. Treat it like the prompt you were handed at the start of this session. (The new session will read the card itself, so the prompt only needs the ref plus a short TL;DR — not the card's full text.)

• If the user already gave the task in the /handoff invocation, expand it into that self-contained prompt.
• Otherwise ask the user what the next session should work on, then show them the exact prompt you're about to send and get their OK — it's the only thing the new agent will see.
• Also pick a short title (a few words) for the session, so it's identifiable in agentium list — e.g. the headway card's title or a terse summary of the task. Set it with --title rather than letting it derive from the first message.

2. Spawn + send, in one command

agentium spawn already defaults --host/--cwd/--backend to this session's own state ($AGENTIUM_SESSION), so a bare spawn starts a sibling in the same worktree on the same host — no need to look them up. --prompt-file - reads the first message from stdin, so a heredoc carries a long, multi-line prompt with zero shell-escaping (no wrestling with quotes, $, or newlines). --wait blocks (bounded) until the host answers with the new session's kind-31988 state; .session is its durable agentium: ref.

ref=$(agentium spawn --title "<short title>" --wait --json --prompt-file - <<'EOF' | jq -r .session
<the self-contained task prompt — as many lines as you like, no escaping>
EOF
)
echo "$ref"

That's the whole handoff. Notes:

• Use a quoted heredoc delimiter (<<'EOF') so the shell doesn't expand $ in the prompt body.
• To hand off into a different worktree, add --cwd /path/to/worktree (a Dave host must be running on the target host to pick up the spawn).
• If you're not inside a Dave session ($AGENTIUM_SESSION unset), there's nothing to inherit — pass --host and --cwd explicitly (fall back to hostname / pwd).
• --prompt-file <path> also takes a real file if you'd rather write the prompt to your scratchpad first; it's mutually exclusive with --prompt.

If spawn --wait times out, no Dave host is running on the target host (or the cwd is wrong) — report that; nothing was created.

3. Report back

Tell the user the new session's ref and how to watch it:

handed off to <ref> — follow it with `agentium log <ref> -f`

Then finish wrapping up this session per CLAUDE.md (commit, headway comment + move, etc.). The handoff doesn't excuse leaving the current work half-done.

Notes

• agentium needs a signing key; inside a Dave session it's already configured. If a command complains you're not logged in, see the agentium skill's "Logging in" section.
• One handoff = one new session. To fan out several tasks, repeat /handoff (or spawn once per task); don't cram multiple unrelated tasks into one prompt.