What's this about?
Baoyu (dotey) reviews a viral tip about "handoff prompts" (summarize a session, paste into a fresh one to save tokens) and says it's mostly outdated — context compaction in modern agents is good enough that /compact or just continuing works. What still matters: strict acceptance criteria. Without them his migration task came back sloppy; after adding "UI must be pixel-identical, screenshot and compare each step," the agent iterated until it matched.
What exactly is a "handoff"?
When an agent session's context window fills up, you'd ask it to write a summary of everything that matters and start a fresh session with that summary — like a departing engineer writing an onboarding doc for their replacement. Tools now do this compression automatically (Claude Code's compaction), so the manual ritual is fading — except when handing work across different agents (Claude Code → Codex), where it still helps.
Why it matters
Two practical takeaways for agent users: stop cargo-culting last year's context tricks, and put your effort into verifiable acceptance criteria — the same lesson as Cherny's screenshot loop, arrived at independently.