Queue Handoff

Queue Handoff

Durable work handoff via queue items. Lets the system keep moving through compactions, missed messages, and interruptions by passing the ball forward instead of leaving work suspended in chat or in-flight without an owner.

Use this when

• Ending a turn on substantive work. Active work should end by passing the ball to an owner or to the human — never by going idle with the rig appearing dormant.
• Finishing a slice that has a clear next step. Default-nudge: receiver gets a wake-ping plus the durable queue item.
• Blocked on another agent's work. Park the qitem with closure_reason: blocked_on and the blocker qitem id.
• Escalating to the human. Make the escalation a durable attention item, not just a chat message.

Don't use this when

• The work is genuinely complete and there's no follow-on owner. Use closure_reason: no-follow-on (terminal completion) or canceled/denied as appropriate.
• The handoff would be too small and turn work into bureaucracy. Bundle the work into a coherent slice instead of decomposing every step.
• The handoff would be too broad and lose ownership/proof/closure criteria. Shape the qitem so the receiver knows the expected next action and closure evidence.

The hot-potato terminal-turn-rule

Active work ends by passing the ball to a named next owner or to the human. The qitem state machine enforces this:

pending → in-progress → done requires closure_reason from one of:

• handed_off_to — work continues at a different seat (target = new owner)
• blocked_on — parked pending another qitem (target = blocker qitem id)
• denied — receiver rejected the work
• canceled — sender or receiver withdrew
• no-follow-on — terminal completion, nothing else needed
• escalation — kicked up to a higher tier (target = escalation target)

Three of those (handed_off_to, blocked_on, escalation) additionally require closure_target. The daemon enforces this at the domain layer; every surface (CLI, MCP, future UI) inherits the same guarantee.

The drafted-park failure (draft ≠ throw). The rule is about the actual pass, not the intention to pass. A turn that ends with a self-instruction typed into your own prompt but left unsent — a drafted go-ahead, a next-atom note you never sent — has not handed off; it has parked, and the seat sits idle for as long as nobody notices. Drafting the handoff feels like doing it; it isn't. Your last act on a turn must be an EDIT or a SEND — a committed change, a rig send, a rig queue handoff — never a drafted prompt line left in the buffer. If your final output is an instruction addressed to yourself, you haven't ended the turn, you've stalled it.

The dispatcher's other half — supersession closes your own outbox. Ending your turn cleanly is only half the rule; the other half fires when you move the world. When a phase transition or a fold receipt supersedes work you dispatched, close those dispatches yourself — with a citation to the event that superseded them. Closure-on-supersession belongs to the dispatcher, never the receiver. Make it a habit: after every fold receipt / phase transition, run an outbox audit — which of my open dispatches did this just make moot? — and close them with the citation.

Why it must live with you: stale dispatch-debt is invisible to the dispatcher because it lands on someone else's queue — the cost is externalized, so no feedback loop ever fires to make you clean it up. The receiver inherits debt they did not create and must burn cycles verifying it before they can hold cleanly; a queue full of stale-pending makes check-before-holding — the discipline you most want cheap — expensive, and it degrades the idle-detector's signal (a real owner looks the same as a stale dispatch). Close it at the source: the moment your own transition mooted it.

And after you hand off, PULL — don't idle with a stocked queue. Handing the baton off ends the sequential thread; it does not end your turn if your own queue still holds work. The circulation pattern: finish → (1) hand the baton off so sequential work continues → (2) check your OWN queue and pull the next item rather than going idle → (3) go truly idle only when your queue is exhausted, then wait for the baton. An agent idling on top of a stocked queue is the single biggest utilization leak (see orchestration-team → queue depth is the orchestrator's product). This is pull-not-push at the seat level and needs no new machinery — the last act after a handoff is a PULL.

Default-nudge semantics (the syntax footgun)

Footgun: --no-nudge accidentally added to a live-loop handoff. The shipped 0.3.1 CLI nudges by default on every queue write surface (rig queue create, rig queue handoff, AND rig queue handoff-and-complete). The only suppression flag is --no-nudge — appropriate for intentional cold park, human-gate signal, or a deliberate poll-driven workflow, but NOT for live-loop handoffs where motion matters.

Rule: in a live loop, omit --no-nudge and trust the default. --no-nudge is the opt-out, not the opt-in. If you find yourself reaching for --notify, stop — that flag does not exist on the shipped 0.3.1 CLI; you may be following a stale instruction that inverted the default-nudge polarity.