Purpose
Make agent work transferable. Any qualified agent should be able to continue, review, validate, or replace another agent's work without relying on private memory, hidden assumptions, or personality-specific habits.
Portable work is not created by making agents identical. It is created by shaping the task so continuation depends on explicit contracts, recorded evidence, concise handoffs, durable context, and clear role boundaries.
Core Rule
Prefer portable work products over personal continuity. A task is portable when another agent can answer these questions from the artifacts alone:
- What outcome is required?
- What constraints are binding?
- What evidence proves the current state?
- What decisions have already been made, and why?
- What role is this agent playing now?
- What remains open, blocked, risky, or intentionally deferred?
Operating Principles
Clear Contracts
Define the work as a contract before optimizing execution. A useful contract states the requested outcome, accepted inputs, forbidden moves, ownership boundary, output shape, and validation criteria. If the contract is fuzzy, the next agent inherits ambiguity instead of progress.
Evidence
Evidence is the shared memory of the work. Prefer concrete artifacts: command output, tests, diffs, citations, logs, screenshots, decision records, and verdicts. Claims without evidence force the next agent to re-investigate the same ground.
Handoffs
A handoff should compress state without hiding uncertainty. Name what changed, what was verified, what was not verified, what failed, and what assumption the next agent must preserve or revisit. A good handoff is short enough to use and specific enough to audit.
Durable Context
Keep context portable by recording only the context needed to continue the work. Do not depend on chat history as the source of truth. Promote durable facts into repo files, issue records, generated reports, or explicit handoff notes. Remove noise, but preserve decision lineage.
Role Boundaries
State the role being played: researcher, planner, implementer, reviewer, validator, release operator, or steward. Role boundaries prevent one agent from silently changing the standard of proof. When a role changes, update the contract and evidence expectations.
Application Checklist
Use this checklist when shaping portable agent work:
- Name the unit of work and its acceptance criteria.
- List the artifacts another agent must inspect first.
- Record decisions as decisions, not as incidental prose.
- Attach evidence to every meaningful claim of completion.
- Separate durable facts from temporary reasoning.
- Identify the current role and the next expected role.
- Close with a handoff that distinguishes done, pending, risky, and blocked.
Failure Modes
- Private continuity: progress exists only in one agent's memory.
- Evidence debt: conclusions are present, but proof is missing.
- Boundary drift: an implementer silently becomes the approver.
- Context flooding: the next agent receives too much transcript and too little contract.
- Handoff theater: a summary sounds complete but omits verification gaps.
Output
Return portability guidance that makes the work transferable: the contract, required evidence, handoff state, durable context to preserve, role boundaries, and any gaps that prevent another agent from safely continuing.