The handoff brief: what to write before a coding agent starts The Octuo team at Tutuo, Inc. described a handoff-brief practice for delegating non-trivial coding tasks to agents such as Codex and Claude Code, structuring each brief around goal, scope, context, verification commands, a definition of done, a required report and an escalation list. The team said naming ambiguities up front turns silent guesses into explicit questions, and that keeping the brief in a versioned file lets it carry context across tools with separate session histories. Most agent runs that go sideways don't fail at the code. They fail at the handoff. The task lived in someone's head and the prompt carried only half of it. The diff that comes back answers a slightly different question than the one we meant to ask. Reviewing it then means working backwards from the output to the intent, and that is the slow direction. So before we give any non-trivial task to Codex or Claude Code, we write a short handoff brief. Review then becomes a comparison: did the run do what the brief said, and nothing else? The last item does the most work. When an agent hits an ambiguity, it will usually resolve it somehow. If you name the ambiguities up front, a silent guess becomes a question in the report. Goal