# 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.

From the [Skills I've built](../index.md#skills) section of [The Muse Field Guide](../index.md).

## 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.

## Where this came from

A research program was handed from one chat to another with a decisions file attached; the receiving chat confirmed uptake and restated the constraints exactly, and months of later work never re-litigated a decision.

Deep dive: [Memory that holds](../deep-dives/memory.md)

Related resources: [where-were-we: re-ground a stale chat](where-were-we.md), [One side chat per topic](one-chat-per-topic.md), [Corrections land in files same-day](corrections-land-same-day.md)

Canonical page: https://www.niclydon.io/muse/items/baton-pass.html