1# Context handoffs
2
3Portable provider and fork handoffs are textual summaries. They do not claim native provider context
4parity.
5
6`ContextHandoffServiceV2` includes user messages, assistant messages, command executions, file
7changes, checkpoints, and prior handoffs. It skips other turn item types. For text-bearing items,
8`compactText` replaces every whitespace run with one space, trims the result, and returns at most
9240 characters. A truncated value contains the first 237 characters followed by `...`. File changes
10carry the filename, while checkpoints carry only the number of files.
11
12Provider handoffs use either the full eligible app history or the delta since that provider last
13participated. Fork merge-back handoffs summarize eligible delta items from the child. Neither path
14reconstructs provider-native session state, tool state, approvals, or omitted text.
15
16Legacy v1 continuation uses a separate algorithm. It considers only user and assistant messages,
17walks backward from the newest message, and builds a transcript suffix within a 32,000-character
18budget. Do not describe that migration budget as the limit for portable handoffs, and do not describe
19the 240-character prefix as a migration rule.