Human Handoff

Human Handoff

Purpose

When a step needs human hands, the handoff itself is a deliverable — and a badly designed one fails silently: the user does something, believes it worked, and you discover the miss two steps later. The core insight, learned the hard way: humans can't see the system state you'd verify, so your instructions must name the completion signal — what DONE looks like — not just the actions. A browser saying "connected" while the terminal grant never completed is the canonical failure.

When to use this skill

• Any step requiring the user's credentials, browser, approvals, or physical presence.
• Multi-step out-of-band flows you can't observe: device-code auth, account creation, 2FA setup, settings pages.
• A human step that already failed once — the retry needs a redesigned handoff, not the same instructions louder.

When NOT to use this skill

• Steps you can do yourself with available tools — exhaust those first; the best handoff is none (do everything possible, hand over only the irreducible remainder).
• Simple one-click asks with self-evident completion ("merge the PR") — a sentence suffices.

Operating procedure

1. Minimize the human surface first. Before writing instructions, take every sub-step you can: prepare the files, pre-fill the values, stage the commands. Hand over only what genuinely requires them.
2. Write exact steps with exact values. Field names with the literal strings to paste, which account to be logged into, which button label to click. "Set up trusted publishing" fails; "Owner: acme-dev, Repository: acme-tool, Workflow: publish.yml, Environment: pypi" succeeds first try.
3. Name the completion signal explicitly. The single highest-leverage line: tell them what DONE looks like from their seat, and distinguish it from intermediate states that masquerade as done. "Don't close anything until the terminal prints ✓ Authentication complete — the browser saying 'connected' is not the finish line."
4. Name the common failure point if the flow has one (the step people skip, the screen that looks final but isn't). One sentence of "this is the part that usually gets missed" beats three retries.
5. Verify from your side when they report back. "Done" from the user is a claim, not a state — check the scope list, the API response, the file, whatever you can observe. If it didn't take, diagnose which step broke before re-asking; never resend identical instructions after a failure.
6. Batch, don't dribble. If the task needs three human steps, hand over all three with their completion signals at once — round-trips are the expensive resource.

Quality bar

• The user could execute the handoff without asking a single clarifying question.
• Every multi-step flow has a stated completion signal, and it's observable from the user's seat.
• Your-side verification happened after "done", before any dependent step ran.
• Second attempts used a changed handoff informed by what failed, not a repeat.

Common failure modes

• Action-only instructions: steps without a completion signal — the user stops at the first screen that looks finished. The single most common handoff failure.
• Verification by user assertion: building on "ok done" without checking; the miss surfaces later, more expensively.
• Retry-by-repetition: the flow failed, so you send the same steps again. If it failed once, the instructions were the bug — find the step that broke.
• Dribbled handoffs: five messages each asking one small thing, when one message could carry the whole human-side checklist.
• Handing over the doable: asking the user for things your tools could do — erodes the value of every future handoff.
• Missing account/context disambiguation: multi-account users approve flows in the wrong identity unless told which avatar should be in the corner.

Example

Device-flow auth (real case, 2026-07): two failed attempts with "run gh auth refresh and approve in the browser" — the user's browser said "connected" and they reasonably stopped, but the grant never completed. Third attempt succeeded by changing one thing: numbering the steps and adding "the browser saying 'connected' isn't the finish line — wait for the terminal to print ✓ Authentication complete." The user's own words after: "the terminal part was what I didn't get before." Same session, PyPI trusted-publishing setup — five exact field values, completion signal, security note on recovery codes — worked on the first try.

Works with sibling skills

• live-state-truth supplies step 5: the user's "done" is a claim requiring observation, same as any other unverified state.
• delegation-discipline is the sibling for delegating to agents; this skill covers delegating to humans, where the delegate can't be given a schema and can't see system state.
• output-structuring: handoffs are checklists with completion conditions — its format rules apply.
• The pack's OPERATOR-GUIDE.md is the mirror-image document (human instructing agent); this skill governs agent instructing human.

Provenance and maintenance

Added 2026-07 from direct session evidence: two device-flow failures cured by naming the completion signal, and a five-field setup that succeeded first-try because of exact values. Re-verify by tracking handoff round-trips: any human step that takes more than one attempt means step 2, 3, or 4 was skipped — find which.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: ralfyishere
• Source: ralfyishere/rules-with-receipts
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.