Handoff Coding Projects — Mid-Refactor State Transfer
Day three of a multi-day code change, chat nearly full: hand off the merged work, the chosen approach, the dangerous cache risk, and the cron audit still pending.
Overview
Multi-day coding efforts carry the most intricate session state: which units are merged, which approach won (and which broke the report builder), which invariant is dangerous to miss. This setup loads a tenant-isolation marathon in Forensic fidelity — the RLS-over-rewrite decision with its reason, the analytics-replica exception as a constraint, the cross-tenant cache risk flagged as the dangerous one, the unverified-cron-paths assumption, and the audit task that must precede the cache work. The forensic rules make the next session quote this state, not reconstruct it.
Workflow
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Carry approach plus reason
"RLS, because rewriting broke the report builder" — the why prevents relitigating the how.
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Flag the dangerous risk by name
Cross-tenant cache leakage travels marked as the one to fear.
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Sequence the pending work
The cron audit before the cache change — order survives the handoff.
Why This Works
- Reasons traveling with decisions prevent the new session from re-deriving worse ones
- Named dangers keep attention where the cost of forgetting is highest
- Sequenced pending work preserves the plan, not just the list
Best for
- Large refactors and migrations spanning sessions
- Work with subtle invariants a fresh session would miss
- Developers pairing with AI across days
Not for
- Sending the source files themselves — that's the Long Prompt Splitter's codebase mode
- Executing the refactor safely — that contract is the Refactor Prompt Builder's
Use cases
- Continuing multi-day refactors across chats
- Carrying the why behind technical choices
- Keeping dangerous risks visible at the boundary