Context Handoff Design
Explore how to design clean context handoffs between AI coordinator and specialists by creating structured packets. Learn to define goals, inputs, constraints, and output shapes that enable specialists to operate independently while preserving information provenance. This lesson helps you optimize communication in multi-agent systems, reduce input noise, and manage conflicting data through source tracking.
The coordinator-specialist split from the previous lesson only works if the coordinator sends the right context to each specialist. Too little context, and the specialist cannot complete their task. Too much context, and the specialist's input is polluted with irrelevant information that degrades its decisions. In this lesson, we design the handoff packet: the structured object the coordinator sends to each specialist and the structure the specialist returns.
By the end of this lesson, we will be able to:
Identify the four components of a well-formed handoff packet.
Transform an overloaded coordinator prompt into scoped, per-specialist handoffs.
Define the expected output shape specialists should return.
Explain why information provenance must be preserved through the handoff chain.
What the handoff packet is
A handoff packet is the structured input that the coordinator sends to a specialist when delegating a subtask. It replaces the coordinator's full conversation history with a curated, minimal set of information: exactly what the specialist needs to do its job, and nothing else. A well-formed handoff packet has four components:
Component | What It Contains | Why It Matters |
Goal | One sentence describing what the specialist should accomplish | Anchors the specialist's task; prevents scope drift |
Inputs | The specific data the specialist needs (IDs, names, parameters) | Prevents the specialist from having to infer context from surrounding noise |
Constraints | Limits on the specialist's behavior (time range, scope, depth) | Keeps specialists from over-reaching or retrieving irrelevant data |
Output shape | The exact structure the coordinator expects back | Makes synthesis predictable; enables the coordinator to detect missing fields |
These four components together give the specialist a complete, self-contained task description. The specialist should be able to complete its work using only the handoff packet. It should never need to ask the coordinator for clarification.
The before: A messy coordinator handoff
Here is the kind of ...