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Handoff Patterns

Agent → user, agent → other agent, agent → tool — clear transitions + state-carry rules.

2 hours1 resources1 prereqs

3 types of handoff:

  1. Agent → User: "Need approval/info to make this decision". HITL pattern.
  2. Agent → Agent: orchestrator delegates to workers, workers return to manager. State + context must be carried.
  3. Agent → Tool: standard tool call.

OpenAI Swarm handoffs primitive: when one agent transfers control to another, how much state to carry (full history / summary only / fresh start) is explicit.

Anthropic pattern: subagent invocation = specialized tool. Subagent has its own system prompt and tool subset.

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