Ripwire Subsystem Handoff

Handoff with ripwire

Nearest neighbours: • You need to UNDERSTAND the subsystem yourself first (not brief someone else) → ripwire-orient. • You need ONE symbol's full contract, not a whole-subsystem brief → ripwire-navigate (--expand). • The recipient needs an architecture/layering read specifically → ripwire-layers.

Trigger: you're handing a subsystem to another agent or developer and want to give them a fast, accurate brief — not a wall of source code.

<dir> = repo root. SUBSYSTEM = the area in plain words (e.g. "ingest pipeline", "graph ranking", "MCP server loop").

1. Task-relevant symbols — ripwire <dir> --for="SUBSYSTEM" --top-k=20 Output: <sigs> ranked by relevance. The top 10 are the symbols the recipient most needs to know. Note their file paths, complexity (cx=), and reuse count (in=).

2. Expand the key symbols — ripwire <dir> --expand=SYM1,SYM2,SYM3 --legend=compact (Pick the top 3 by rank from step 1.) Output: full bodies + callee signatures. This is the actual contract — paste it into the handoff verbatim rather than paraphrasing. Bodies are redacted by default — high-confidence credentials (API keys, tokens, connection strings) are masked before you see them, so pasting this straight into a handoff doc is safe as-is; pass --no-redact only if you deliberately need the verbatim secret (e.g. auditing the credential-handling code itself).

3. Design rationale — ripwire <dir> --recall="SUBSYSTEM" Output: most relevant markdown docs (planning/design notes, READMEs) in full. Read and summarize the key decisions — why this design, not another. That's what the recipient most needs and least gets from reading code. Also check ripwire <dir> --notes --legend=compact for this subsystem's symbols/files — any gotcha a prior agent already pinned (<note d="date">…</note>) surfaces automatically on the symbols step 1/2 emit; fold it into the brief instead of letting the recipient rediscover it. Before you hand off, --note-add="SYM_or_path: text" any trap you found yourself that isn't already written down — the cheapest thing you can leave the successor. If the same symbol has collected several notes across handoffs, that's a signal to graduate it out of prose entirely, into a --quality-ack reason or a standing --arch deny rule.

4. Maintenance risk, scoped to the subsystem — point --hotspots straight at the subsystem instead of filtering the whole-repo list: ripwire <subdir> --hotspots (verified: subdir scoping works, same as --dead-code=DIR). If the subsystem isn't a clean subdirectory, keep the repo root and --exclude the rest (repeatable flag) to fence the scan to just the area you're briefing on. Also worth a look: ripwire <dir> --hotspots --legend=compact (whole-repo, no scoping) to see whether any subsystem file also lands in the global top-10 — a file can be locally worst-in-subsystem and still unremarkable repo-wide, or vice versa; that distinction matters to the recipient. Tell them: "this file is gnarly — high churn, high complexity — be careful and run tests after any change here."

Calibration — what's fact vs framing here

• Steps 1–3 are direct reads (ranked signatures, full bodies, doc text) — trustworthy as far as the underlying call graph goes (name-based edges; a symbol with high amb= in --expand's <calls> block means some of ITS calls were ambiguous — don't present those as certain in the brief, flag them). --recall returns doc text, not a verified fact — summarize what the docs claim, not what's provably still true; a stale design doc will still get picked up.
• Step 4 (hotspots) is churn × cognitive complexity — a maintenance-pain signal, not a defect count. Frame it to the recipient as "developers keep touching this, tread carefully," not "this file has bugs."