Agent Handoff

Handoff is the edge between agents, the point where one finishes and another begins. It sits underneath task decomposition and orchestration: decomposition splits a goal into subtasks, orchestration decides which agent runs when, and the handoff is how the output and context actually move across each join. Without it, a multi-agent system is a set of strangers, each re-reading the original request because nothing was passed forward.

The word comes from support and incident response, escalate to a specialist and pass the case file, and it became a named primitive in multi-agent frameworks as teams moved from one agent doing everything to many specialized agents. The design question is always the same: what crosses the boundary, and how. Forwarding the whole conversation is simple but grows expensive with each hop. Carrying a typed packet of just the outputs and fields that matter is leaner and more reliable. In Overcut, handoffs are usually event-mediated rather than direct calls: an agent finishes and emits an event carrying its structured output, and the next workflow picks the work up, with the shared state living in the control plane and every handoff written to the audit trail.

A bug report lands and a triage agent works it: it classifies the issue, sets severity, and narrows the cause to a function whose API response changed shape. It does not hand the raw ticket thread to the next agent. It emits a structured summary, the suspected cause, the affected files, the severity, and an implementation agent picks that up. Because the context crossed as state, the implementation agent does not re-read the thread or re-derive the cause. It writes the fix, adds a test, and opens a pull request, then hands the PR to a review agent that checks it against the team's standards. Each boundary is a handoff, the work moves forward without a person relaying it, and the audit trail shows exactly what was passed at each step.