Hand work to a selected coding agent with ak:handover

Capture a portable handoff, then dispatch one single-job orchestration spec at a specific coding runtime with preflight, safety gates, and arbiter review.

Use ak:handover to continue in-progress work in a different coding runtime with a controlled, captured, safety-gated job. The Skill is a thin composition — it does not duplicate capture, model routing, dispatch, or arbiter logic. It runs three steps in order: capture via ak:handoff, build one deterministic single-job orchestration spec, dispatch via ak:orchestrate, then report.

Choose ak:handover for one-shot continuation

Use ak:handover when

You want to continue current work in a specifically selected coding runtime.
You want the successor to read a portable, redacted handoff before it acts.
You want the dispatch to run under ak:orchestrate safety gates, capture, resumability, and arbiter review.

Choose another Skill when

You only want to save context and hand off later. Use ak:handoff alone.
You want to orchestrate multiple jobs in parallel or in sequence. Use ak:orchestrate directly with your YAML spec.
You want to route generic work to the right skill. Use ak:agentkit.

Argument shape

ak:handover [task] --agent <id> [--cwd PATH] [--task TEXT] [--handoff PATH] [--model NAME] [--yes]

Examples:

/ak:handover --agent claude-code "continue the OAuth callback fix"
/ak:handover --agent codex --cwd . --task "implement the next action in the handoff"
/ak:handover --agent cursor --handoff plans/handoffs/oauth-callback.md
/ak:handover --agent opencode --model anthropic/claude-sonnet-5 --yes

Flag	Effect
`--agent <id>`	Required. Selected coding runtime. Must resolve in the runtime catalog. No default, no silent substitution.
`[task]` positional	Focus for the successor agent. Included in the handoff Mission section and in the orchestrate job's `prompt`.
`--task TEXT`	Alternative to the positional task string. If both are given, the positional value wins with a warning.
`--cwd PATH`	Workspace root for the dispatched job. Defaults to the current workspace root.
`--handoff PATH`	Use an existing handoff artifact instead of generating a new one. Must exist and pass schema validation.
`--model NAME`	Override the model for CLI-runtime jobs. Rejected when `--agent internal`.
`--yes`	Approve write or destructive continuation. Flips the job's `approval:` from `require` to `inherit`.

Runtime selection

--agent must resolve to an ID in the Skill's runtime catalog:

First-class: claude-code, codex, ak-run, internal.
External, preflight-gated: opencode, copilot, cursor, cline, qwen-code, grok, kimi, agy.
Not dispatchable: gemini-cli — the retired Gemini CLI path is not supported.

Availability, authentication, flags, models, and capability tiers come from ak:orchestrate's live runtime matrix at run time. A missing binary, missing authentication, unavailable internal agent, or failed preflight returns a clear blocker in the final report — never a silent substitution.

Handoff validation

The handoff artifact — freshly captured or supplied via --handoff — must pass strict schema validation before dispatch. Failure is a hard blocker; the Skill refuses to dispatch and prints the failing checks.

Every required H2 section from the handoff artifact schema is present and spelled exactly.
Exact next actions contains at least one item, with the first item bold-prefixed **First safe step**.
No raw-secret pattern matches any line.
Frontmatter handoff-version, when present, is 1.

Safety gates and refusals

Runtime-specific bypass flags — --dangerously-skip-permissions, --allow-all-tools, --yolo — are never emitted. Jobs that would embed them in the prompt are refused.
--model is rejected when --agent internal. Internal jobs do not set model in the spec.
--fallback-agent is not accepted in v1. On preflight failure, the Skill reports the blocker and suggests rerunning with a different --agent.

Final report

Every run prints the handoff artifact path, the orchestrate run directory, the selected runtime, the job result, verification status, produced artifacts, and the next action — in that order.

ak:handoff — capture the portable handoff artifact.
ak:orchestrate — dispatch, safety, and arbiter review.
ak:agentkit — route generic work to the right Skill.

Hand work to a selected coding agent with ak:handover

On this page