baton-pass: hand a chat to a successor
Hands a side chat's work to a fresh successor chat, with a decisions file, so the work survives compaction and the new chat starts from documents.
What it does
Hands a side chat's work to a fresh successor chat with its context intact: the work, the constraints, and the decisions already made, carried in a decisions file rather than in a summary of a summary. It exists because conversations compact as they grow, and a compacted chat is an unreliable narrator of its own history.
Trigger
When a topic changes fundamentally, or a chat has grown long enough that its summaries are doing the remembering.
What you need
- State kept in files as the work proceeds, so there is something to hand over.
- A receiving chat that confirms uptake in writing, restating the constraints in its own words.
Setup sketch
Make handovers two-ended by rule: the sending side states work, constraints, and prior decisions; the receiving side confirms in writing. A handover that is not confirmed is assumed not to have happened.
Deep dive: Memory that holds →