Claude Code session handoff

Write it down. Then resume.

A session ends with value sitting only in the conversation: the decisions you reached, the dead ends you ruled out, the thing you were halfway through. When that window closes, compaction has already started eating it. The fix is not a second harness. Put the decision in a file the moment it is made, then let pstack pick the session back up.

What belongs on disk is small:

• The decisions made - what you chose and, briefly, why.
• What is actually on disk - not what you intended to do.
• The single next move - so resume starts working instead of orienting.

Pause and pickup are already skills

Open Pstack ships pause-safely and session-pickup as invoke-only playbooks. You name them through /pstack:poteto-mode. SessionStart does not resume; it only reminds you to route. There is nothing to switch on, and nothing to build on top.

Treat context pressure as a signal to write the decision down, not as a trigger to fire a homemade handoff skill. A compaction hook, a 5-gate save ritual, or a memory plugin is machinery the Code Machine already refused to ship.

Train the method on the Open Pstack trainer. Thought→plan is shadcn/improve; this page is not that skill.

Why this beats a generic memory plugin

• It is yours. Plain files in the repo. You can read, diff, edit, and commit them.
• It is the same HOW as building. Pause and pickup are pstack playbooks, not a bolted-on product feature.
• It does not compete. A second handoff protocol next to pstack is two sources of truth. That hobbles the agent.

This belongs in your project setup the same way context management does: files the next session is guaranteed to read, not a black box you hope retrieved the right thing.

How claudesetup fits

claudesetup stamps a place for durable state (docs/, docs/state/, plans/), names Open Pstack as the door, and stamps improve for thought→plan. It does not ship a homemade 5-gate handoff skill. You get the substrate and the Code Machine from commit one, and you own the files.