Handing work between agents

Sometimes the agent that should finish a job isn’t the one that started it — you want a second opinion, a different model, or simply a fresh window. And sometimes an agent loses its conversation through no choice of yours.

Both are the same problem: a session that knows nothing, sitting next to a screen full of context. Mastery HQ closes that gap by copying the recent exchanges across.

Handing off on purpose

Every agent window with a conversation shows a Hand off button in its header, next to · linked.

1. Press it and pick another open agent.
2. Their input fills with the recent exchanges plus a line telling them to take over.
3. Edit it — then press Enter.

It fills their box rather than sending. That’s deliberate: the useful part of a handover is nearly always the sentence you add to it (“…and this time don’t touch the migration”). Sending it straight away would skip the only step that makes it yours.

It’s a copy, not a move. The agent you took it from keeps its conversation and carries on. Nothing is cleared, nothing is closed.

The button only appears when there’s something to hand over. A window that has only just opened, or that shows nothing but system messages, has nothing worth copying.

When it happens by itself

Some things end a conversation whether you like it or not:

• The account hit its usage limit and the window switched to another one you’d configured.
• The account wasn’t signed in and the window switched to one that was.
• The previous conversation couldn’t be resumed — the CLI no longer recognises the session id.

In all three the agent gets a genuinely new conversation, because a CLI session belongs to the account’s own configuration and cannot travel between accounts. Before the app re-runs your task on the new session, it carries the recent exchanges across, along with a line explaining why the agent is seeing them.

You’ll see the switch reported in the window (⚡ claude hit its usage limit on 'main' — switched to 'alt'…), and the work continues.

What actually gets carried

The recent exchanges, word for word. Not a summary.

That is a deliberate trade, and it’s worth understanding:

• A summary would be shorter and better organised, but producing one costs a model turn on the session being abandoned — which, in the case this exists for, is the account that just ran out of turns. It would fail for exactly the reason the work failed.
• Copying needs nothing but text already on your screen. It works on every backend, and it works when the account is rate-limited.

So the handover is an excerpt: the last several exchanges, verbatim, with everything older left behind. The agent receiving it is told that plainly — that it’s a partial record, that nobody has condensed or checked it, and that it should ask rather than assume if something it needs is missing. An agent handed a partial record labelled “here is the state” would treat it as complete and act confidently on what it cannot see.

Messages that were only the app talking — the switch notices, “Process exited” — are left out. They’re this app’s plumbing, not part of your conversation.

The other handoff

There is a second, different thing with a similar name. Ask Hermes to “hand this to Maya” and the source conversation summarises itself into a structured document — state, decisions, open items, files touched — which then seeds the other agent.

	Hand off button	“hand this to Maya”
What it sends	Recent exchanges, verbatim	A written summary of the whole conversation
Costs a model turn	No	Yes, on the source conversation
Works when rate-limited	Yes	No
Works on every backend	Yes	Claude sessions only
Best for	Continuing work, quickly	Passing on a long, finished piece of work

Use the button when you want to keep moving. Use the Hermes command when the conversation is long enough that a summary is genuinely more useful than the last few turns.

Limits worth knowing

• Only the recent exchanges travel. If the answer lives in something you discussed an hour ago, paste it in yourself.
• The CLI’s own memory never travels. Sessions belong to the account that created them. Every handover is a reconstruction from the transcript, not a transplant.
• Minimized windows aren’t offered as targets — restore the window first.