Agentic work becomes more powerful when one agent can hand a task to another. It also becomes harder to supervise if the handoff contains only a confident final answer.
A useful handoff needs a receipt: a compact record of the request, the evidence considered, the actions taken and the state left behind. That receipt gives the next agent — and the person overseeing the work — a reliable place to continue.
Preserve the original intent
Delegation often compresses a long conversation into a short instruction. If that instruction loses the user's actual goal, the next agent may complete the wrong task perfectly.
The receipt should retain the original request alongside the bounded subtask. This makes it possible to check whether the delegated work still serves the outcome the user asked for.
Record evidence, not hidden reasoning
The next agent does not need a private stream of internal reasoning. It needs the sources, files, tool results and decisions that materially shaped the work.
That evidence should be concise and inspectable. A repository SHA, document reference, validation result or external source is more useful than a vague statement that something was checked.
Make state changes explicit
When an agent creates a branch, changes a record or prepares a release, the handoff should say exactly what changed and what remains untouched. This protects the next contributor from repeating an action or assuming that a draft has already been approved.
The same principle applies to failure. If a source was unavailable or a permission boundary stopped the task, that condition belongs in the receipt.
Design for continuation
A good receipt answers four questions: what was requested, what was found, what changed and what should happen next. With those answers, agent collaboration feels less like passing messages between black boxes and more like a well-run team leaving clear notes for one another.