You write a handoff file at the end of most working days, because the next session starts blank and will otherwise redo what the last one finished.
The parts you re-type are mechanical: what changed, what ran, what passed, what
was promised and not done. archie session handoff writes those from the
transcript. The judgment stays yours.
What it prints
Under 60 lines by default, ceiling 120. Every claim comes from a row, quoted verbatim with a sequence number or a timestamp. Nothing is summarised — the moment a model writes the prose, the receipt stops meaning anything.
| Section | Source |
|---|---|
| What the task was | the session's first prompt |
| Files touched | the blame index |
| Commands run, and how they ended | tool calls with captured exit codes |
| Outcome rung reached | the ladder |
| Decided, then compacted away | the compaction diff |
| Loose ends | stated intents with no follow-through |
| Compaction count | how many times the context was replaced |
It also prints what it cannot know. Open decisions, PR and CI state, and environment traps are not in the index, so they are named as gaps rather than filled in.
Loose ends
A loose end is an assistant stating an intent, emitting no tool call, and handing control back to you. Measured on one 23 MB session, 7,144 events: 99 stated intents found, 55 of them with no tool call and a user turn next.
One of the 55, verbatim:
Still owe you 03 and 04 over HTTP; I'll finish those next unless you want something else first.
That was never done. It surfaced hours later in a hand-written handoff, and only because a human remembered.
archie session loose-ends prints that section alone. --prompt gives you the
copyable text to hand to an agent that has the repository open.
Picking a session
Leave the id off on a terminal and a picker lists the newest sessions — type a
number, type text to filter by id, repo, adapter or prompt. Off a terminal,
--last takes the newest session for this directory's repository. A unique
prefix of a session id works anywhere the full id does.
Over MCP
session_handoff returns the same markdown to a coding agent mid-session.
session_carry_forward(repo, n) returns the last few handoffs for a repo, newest
first, so a session's first tool call can be the catch-up. Neither writes a
file — where the handoff lands is your business. See
MCP setup.
What to run
archie session handoff --last
archie session handoff --last --markdown --max-lines 60
archie session handoff --last --redact
archie session handoff --json
archie session loose-ends --last --prompt