How an AI prototype becomes an operated capability another person can understand, monitor, and change.

Learning stageOperating disciplineProof statusPattern documented; needs a complete handover packet from a future capability slice.

Handover

What it is

Handover is the operating boundary between a clever prototype and a real capability. It answers who owns the workflow, how to run it, how to verify it, how to stop it, how to change it, and what failure looks like.

Learning goal

Learn to finish AI work in a way that makes the next operator less dependent on the original builder.

Why it matters in production

AI systems often start as experiments. If the handover is missing, the system depends on one person's memory: which prompt matters, which model route is safe, which logs to check, which failures are known, and when a human should step in. That is not a production capability.

How I actually build it

A handover packet should include:

Purpose and non-goals.
Source-of-truth locations.
Model routes and fallback behavior.
Secrets and authority boundaries.
Verification commands and expected outputs.
Evaluation scorecard location.
Known failure modes and escalation rules.
Rollback or disable procedure.
Owner and review cadence.

The handover can be a ticket note, runbook, ADR, README, or operator page. The format matters less than whether a second person can use it.

Practice loop

Take one AI workflow and ask someone else to explain it back from the docs.
Run the verification command from a clean shell.
Trigger or simulate one failure.
Confirm the rollback or disable path.
Update the handover packet with every missing assumption.

Proof artifact

A useful proof is a handover packet plus a clean-run verification note. It should show that the capability can be operated without reconstructing context from chat history.

Current status

This page defines the standard. The next real proof should be attached to the first guardrails or evaluation slice that becomes operational.

What worked, what didn't

What worked in FOS is using tickets as the handoff ledger. What still needs discipline is making handover a required output of every public capability page, not an afterthought once the interesting build is done.

Next build

When the guardrails slice lands, write the handover packet at the same time: purpose, source files, command, failure modes, disable path, and owner.