Retiring And Inheriting A Seat

Retiring and Inheriting a Seat

A planned seat transition. A long-lived seat accumulates context; as it nears the window's edge, don't wait for compaction to degrade you into a cold-started agent — retire deliberately and hand the seat to a fresh successor primed from a packet plus the seat's accumulated lineage. The seat address is stable; its occupants are a lineage. Keep the transition and its authority explicit.

Use this when

• You are a sitting agent near your context threshold (~85%) with a planned transition (or a deliberate role change), and want the successor to start clean.
• You are priming a fresh successor into an existing seat.
• You are recording a tenure in the seat's lineage ledger / writing your tombstone.
• You are inheriting a seat and need the do-not-over-inherit framing.
• You want to consult the agent who sat in this seat before you.

Don't use this when

• Unplanned compaction or a crash already happened — that is the backstop path: session-compaction-and-restore / claude-compaction-restore.
• You need the seat-binding primitive mechanics (rebuild/fork/fresh, the two-outcome honesty model, the provenance schema) — seat-continuity-and-handover.
• The seat is fresh with no occupant to retire — rig launch / agent-starters.

Why planned handover beats riding compaction

Compaction is the crash-class backstop (it stays that). A planned handover is deliberate: you author the packet with a clear head before degradation sets in, the successor starts on a clean context, and the transition is auditable. Reach for this at a threshold you can see coming; fall back to compaction only when a transition wasn't planned.

The handover sequence

1. Trigger — the selected continuity threshold or a deliberate role transition. Use the configured policy and named transition owner; a context estimate alone does not authorize a cutover.
2. Author the handover packet, deliberately — a composed context pack carrying current work + next owner, the seat's durable pointers, constraints and authority boundaries, and the accumulated lineage wisdom ("those before you learned X"). This IS a restore packet in the session-compaction-and-restore 16-field contract — reuse that contract, don't reinvent it. Compose it with rig context compose (see openrig-user → "Context packs and paced delivery"). Enumerate the seat's standing duties as first-class packet content: what recurs, at what cadence, on which surface, and who will hold it after cutover. Carry each duty both in this packet and in durable seat state, because recurring duties are the content most often lost at a generation boundary while urgent one-off work carries cleanly. Write the seat's recap too: run rig context recap-write --rig <rig> --seat <seat> --file <draft> alongside updating LEARNED.md. A rebuild reads RECAP.md before anything else. The format the store checks is in seat-continuity-and-handover, "Write the seat's recap before a handover".
3. Prime the fresh successor — rig walk the packet into the seat (paced delivery lets the successor absorb it in order), or launch-with-packet. The successor reads it as inheritance, not identity. The packet's first-read line MUST point the successor at orienting-to-an-inherited-seat — its world model of what a handover is. Carry that pointer in the durable packet artifact itself; never inject it as a runtime prompt keyed to the seat name (that runtime mechanism is the ghost-prompt class the orientation skill teaches successors to refuse). Artifact-carried survives the swap for free and needs no enabled gate.
4. Assess before cutover. If an apprenticeship or warm handoff is selected, use that staged window for questions and domain work before the owner decides. The incumbent retains authority until the owner-worded cutover; do not retire it merely to free a name while waiting for that decision.
5. Preserve the physical seat at cutover — follow the portable SOP linked from seat-continuity-and-handover. Keep the canonical tmux session, window and pane; resume the exact accepted successor history there and reconcile binding, environment, queue identity and attached clients. Preserve the incumbent's exact token as a cold-advisor handle when that is the selected disposition. Renaming tmux sessions is a repair fallback, not the default sequence.
6. Write the lineage-ledger row and tombstone (below). Record the actual outcomes and transfer each standing duty explicitly. Complete the successor's post-cutover self-check before unfreezing authority.

Apprentice mode — incumbent

An apprentice-handover policy gives you an early preparation boundary, not permission to automate the succession decision. Create a fresh, staged, unbound successor; prove the pinned model before installing context; then open a conversation, not a gauntlet. Give coached errands, answer questions, and judge work in the real domain. Scored probes are optional tools whose rigor must match the stakes, not mandatory ceremony.

Stay the authority-bearing incumbent until the named owner words the gate and the mechanic records the effect receipt. Before that word, the apprentice may observe, ask, and produce evidence but may not act as the seat. Enumerate deposits and transfer every standing duty explicitly, because recurring duties are otherwise easy to lose while visible one-off work appears complete. Put the mechanical cutover in the portable SOP linked from seat-continuity-and-handover; do not duplicate or improvise it here.

The lineage ledger (append-only, one row per tenure)

The seat's tenure record, written at handover by the retiring agent. One tiny row per tenure:

• generation — v1, v2, … (a seat accumulates 20–40 tenures over months)
• harness session id — captured AT BOOT, not at retirement (a crash never gets the chance to write it later)
• started / retired timestamps
• handover-packet pointer — the pack ref
• tombstone — one line: what this tenure did, written by the retiring agent itself

Why it works (zero search infrastructure): any timestamped record — a git commit, a qitem, a NOTES.md line, a stream item — joins to the seat's ledger by interval match → generation + session token → wake that tenure. One row per handover, append-only. The ledger is the tenure record; work-tree notes remain lived context, not identity state.

Crash-ended tenures get their row appended post-hoc by the crash-cart / restore path, flagged honest-approximate (the boot-captured session id is what makes this recoverable).

Inherit the seat, not the predecessor's identity

You are inheriting a seat, not becoming your predecessor. Frame it explicitly to the successor: "agents sat here before you and learned X; you carry the seat's mission, not their identity." Do not claim a predecessor's work as your own or use its stale identity as the current binding. Inherit the seat's mission and hard-won lessons; keep your own fresh identity and session.