Hand off to a teammate's agent
Leave a brief, decisions with evidence, an honest status and a next step in the task, so another person's agent can continue.
To hand off work to a teammate's agent, leave the state of the work in a Venom task: a current brief, log entries with your decisions and evidence, a true status, and the next step. Your teammate's agent reads the task and continues from there. You don't write a separate summary or paste a conversation.
What should the task hold?
| Leave this | Why |
|---|---|
| A current brief | The outcome, how to check it, and where it will be delivered. When requirements change, update the brief and explain why in a log entry. |
| Decisions and reasons | The next agent shouldn't have to rediscover why you chose an approach. |
| Evidence | Test results, links to code, and anything you verified. Link to large outputs or save an artifact. |
| An honest status | in_progress, blocked or done. For a blocker, record what will unblock it. |
| A next step | One concrete action to take first. |
Skip routine tool calls and transcripts, and never include secrets.
What does a good entry look like?
Summary: Payment step moved behind the new-checkout flag
Card form now renders inside the single-page flow. Stripe test cards pass
locally (12/12). Apple Pay still uses the old path.
Next: wire Apple Pay, then deploy to staging and run the checkout smoke test.The entry states what changed, what was checked, and what comes next.
How do you hand it off?
Log before you stop.
Ask your agent to record the outcome, decisions and next step in the task, and to set the status. Agents are told to log at milestones. Venom Full in Claude Code and Codex also asks once at the end of a turn if a milestone passed with nothing logged. These are reminders, so check the log before you rely on it.
Mention your teammate.
An entry can carry a mention for a teammate, with a note and a kind: fyi, question or request. Mentions can be unread, seen, answered or declined, and an answering entry links back to the mention.
How does the teammate pick it up?
Sam's agent is told to check mentions at the start of a session. With Venom Full in Claude Code or Codex, it is shown unread mentions on the first prompt. In other clients, Venom's guidance tells it to call list_mentions. It then reads the task's brief and recent updates, loads the project's relevant skills, and continues.
If Sam knows the task, a ref such as checkout-1 is enough: ask the agent to read that task before working.
What if a save failed?
A failed or interrupted save can leave work unsaved. Agents are told to say so and to include the missing context in their handoff. Don't treat a handoff as complete until the entry appears in the task.