Session Handoff -- Anti-Amnesia Pattern

The fundamental problem with autonomous agents: they lose everything on restart. Every session starts from zero. The operator has to re-explain active tasks, blocked items, decisions made. This breaks the promise of autonomy.

The anti-amnesia pattern fixes this. It's a two-part system: save before shutdown, recover on startup.

The Problem

LLM agents are stateless. Each session is a fresh context window. Even with persistent memory tools, the agent doesn't know what to look for unless it's told. You restart Hermes, say "hi", and get:

"Hello! How can I help you today?"

Instead of:

"Welcome back. HN and TikTok are rate-limited from testing. LinkedIn fires its first cron at 5am tomorrow. We were mid-way through the platform connectivity sprint."

The first response wastes time. The second lets you pick up where you left off.

The Pattern

Save Before Shutdown

When a session ends (user says "bye", milestone reached, or before restart), the agent writes a structured handoff:

TASK_HISTORY.md gets appended with:
  - Active tasks and their status
  - Blocked items with reasons
  - Decisions made this session
  - Platform state (what's working, what's not)

This isn't a diary. It's a machine-readable checkpoint. Just the facts needed to resume.

Recover on Startup

The session-start skill includes automatic context recovery. Before doing anything else:

1. Read TASK_HISTORY.md (last 50 lines)
2. Query session_search() for recent sessions
3. Query GBrain for pages tagged active-task
4. Reconstruct and present: "Here's what we were doing..."

The agent doesn't wait to be asked. Recovery is automatic.

Architecture

Session End
    ↓
corpusiq-session-handoff skill
    ├── Writes structured state to TASK_HISTORY.md
    ├── Saves handoff page to GBrain (tagged: active-task)
    └── Updates active task tags

[Restart  --  agent has no context]

Session Start
    ↓
corpusiq-session-start skill (Step 6: Context Recovery)
    ├── Reads TASK_HISTORY.md
    ├── Queries session_search for last sessions
    ├── Queries GBrain for active-task tagged pages
    ├── Reconstructs state
    └── Reports: "Resuming X, Y blocked, Z pending"

What Gets Saved

Not everything. Only what survives a restart:

Saved	Not Saved
Active task names + status	Individual tool call results
Blocked items + reasons	Intermediate debugging state
Platform connection states	File paths (re-discoverable)
Decisions made this session	Conversation history (in session_search)
Cron job states	Transient errors

Implementation

Two skills power this:

corpusiq-session-handoff -- Runs at session end. Writes structured state. Tags GBrain pages. Appends to TASK_HISTORY.md.

corpusiq-session-start -- Runs at session start. Step 6 recovers context from TASK_HISTORY.md, session_search, and GBrain before any other action.

Why This Works

Most "memory" solutions try to preserve everything. They fail because: - Context windows fill up - Embeddings drift - Relevance decays

The anti-amnesia pattern preserves decision state, not data. It answers one question: "What were we doing and where did we leave off?"

The rest is re-discoverable.

*

---

This Hermes repo is one of the largest structured collections of public AI, automation, business, and technology documentation. Content remains attributed to original authors and repositories. Indexed and organized by www.CorpusIQ.io.