How a Handoff Works — Oathe Docs

Tasks move between harnesses as compiled context bundles. What Oathe saves, what the next agent receives, and why nothing depends on a session staying alive.

Model context is a cache. It compacts, truncates, and dies with the session. Oathe goes up a layer of abstraction: the task — not the conversation — is the durable thing.

What gets saved

Saved	Why it matters
The task and who owns it	The next agent continues assigned work, not the last sentence someone typed
Progress and evidence	The trajectory is analyzed against the task intent — agents must be doing what they say they’re doing
Side-effect receipts	A deploy or payment that already happened doesn’t happen again on retry
Definition of done	Established before agent work starts, so it can’t quietly drift
Workspace checkpoint	Branch, commit, and work-in-progress bytes survive the session

The flow

task claimed
  → attempt 1 (Claude Code) works in a scoped workspace
  → checkpoint · checkpoint · checkpoint
  → attempt 1 dies (crash, kill, rate limit, closed laptop)
  → task survives, still owned
  → attempt 2 (Codex) gets a compiled bundle + a checkpoint
  → attempt 2 inspects the diff and reruns the test before trusting anything
  → work completes; the agent files a completion statement + evidence report
  → a non-author checker verifies the agent did exactly what it states
  → only then is the task settled

The context bundle is compiled from saved state for each new attempt: what’s claimed, what’s done, what’s left, and the test that decides whether it’s finished. Oathe never pretends to recover an agent’s hidden reasoning — the bundle is built from durable facts, not transcript sync.

What this is not

Not a harness. Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw and friends keep their own prompts, tools, and UX. Oathe sits underneath.
Not a model router. Routers pick where a turn runs. Oathe preserves what work exists, what already happened, and what would finish it.
Not transcript sync. No copying hidden state between vendors.
Not a memory product. Transcripts are evidence, never the source of truth.

Interrupted work — network drop, power cut, rate limit — picks right back up on the next attempt. No tokens wasted.