handoff

<!-- Copyright 2026 Anthropic PBC --> <!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 -->

Handoff

Standing rules in CLAUDE.md apply — especially rules 10 and 11: fresh reader, lead with what to do. The incoming on-call missed everything; this document is their entire week's context, and it must arrive as work they can start, not "here's what happened".

Sources — sweep all of them

Fan out across every capability in STACK.md for the shift window (default: the week since the last handoff):

• pager — every page and incident: state, severity, resolution
• alert-channels — what fired, what people said, what never got a thread
• code — merges/PRs touching on-call-relevant paths; reverts; deploys
• metrics — week-over-week trend of the health signals in ONCALL.md
• lessons.md — every entry appended this shift
• each incident record's history over the shift window

Cross-reference: an alert with no thread, a lessons entry with no incident, a metric trending wrong with no alert — these orphans are usually the "watch this week" items.

Format

Post to the channel as a message with the exec summary, full doc attached or linked:

📋 On-call handoff — week of {{date}}

Exec summary: N incidents (n resolved, n monitoring). N pages. Anything systemic in one clause. On-call health: the required weekly metric — incidents and pages vs. last week, split by business-hours / off-hours, false pages, the rubber-stamp fraction (diagnoses acted on with no recorded verification step — the early warning that humans stopped cross-examining; see eval/replay.md), and whether the trend is up or down. This section is how the whole setup is measured over time (see eval/replay.md), so never omit it and never soften it. Intake health: median and worst time from symptom onset to incident declared this week (onset from the alert/thread timeline; declaration from the incident record). If incidents routinely run 40 minutes before anyone declares one, that's the process finding of the week — you can't fix an intake path you don't measure. Watch this week: the 1–3 things most likely to page you, each with why and a link to its pattern (lessons.md tag or reference file). Start here: the single highest-priority open item, with its current state and next action. Full doc: [link] · New to this channel? Read ONBOARD.md — how to read a diagnosis, challenge one, or silence a routine.

The full doc, per incident: what happened (one fresh-reader sentence, links) · what it means (pattern or one-off? systemic risk?) · what you should do (nothing / monitor / action, with the action named).

Then: open items ranked by "will this page you?", not by age. Preventable repeats called out as playbook gaps with proposed reference-file amendments (rule 9 — fix the playbook, not just the incident).

Drift check (required section)

The ground moves between incidents; this is where the kit notices. Each week, flag:

• any STACK.md binding that failed or 403'd during the week's work
• any reference file whose first-checks cite a tool or query that no longer responds
• anything in the deploys feed or announcement channels suggesting the infrastructure changed under the playbooks — a migration completed, a tool replaced, a service renamed
• the routine registry vs. reality: does the "Standing work" canvas match the channel's actual routines? Fix the registry; flag any routine that exists but was never registered
• open incidents with no update in >{{72h}} — the zombie list, each with its three-leg staleness evidence per ONCALL.md's lifecycle section, framed as "close it or update it", never closed by Claude (rule 2)

Each flag arrives as a proposal, never an edit (rule 9): "re-run Discover for this binding," a reference-file amendment PR, or "re-run the replay against post-change incidents" (see eval/replay.md's re-validation triggers). A quiet week with no drift gets one line: "no drift detected."

Discipline

• "Here's what happened" without "start here" is a diary, not a handoff — the priorities are the point.
• Never soften a preventable repeat. Write it plainly: "2 auto-reverts, both preventable."
• If the week was quiet, say so in two lines and stop. Padding a quiet week erodes trust in loud ones.