Handoff Driven Development

Handoff-driven development (HDD)

Русская версия — [ru/](ru/).

A specification system for solo developers and small teams working with LLM agents. HDD = Spec-driven development + handoffs: specs describe the existing system and are obliged to stay true; handoffs carry the context of unfinished work across sessions and tasks.

Two problems it solves:

1. Context hygiene. The model's context must contain what the task needs — and nothing else. The right context is the right answer. Handoffs are recipes for assembling context per task, including what NOT to load.
2. Task and session switching. Tasks run in parallel, sessions end. Switching between tasks is choosing a handoff; a new session picks up exactly where the previous one left off.

A long-lived track eventually stops being one piece of work. Then the handoff stops being a document and becomes a thin index: a map of strands, each with a permanent home of its own. Distillation does not wait for the track to close.

Companion article: [English (dev.to)](https://dev.to/yetanothervan/handoff-driven-development-31ch) · [Russian (Habr)](https://habr.com/ru/articles/1055460/).

What's inside

• specs/spec-specs.md — the rules of the system in one document: genres, statuses, conventions, tombstone protocol, backlogs, work tracks and their second level (strands, consolidation, work plans), audit
• specs/specs-map.md — starter root specification map
• specs/handoff-template.md — session handoff template, in both shapes: a plain handoff and a consolidated thin index with a strand map
• specs/TRACKS.md / specs/TRACKS-LOG.md — index of live tracks / archive of closed ones
• specs-audit.py — audit script: broken links, orphaned specs, missing status lines
• CLAUDE-block.md — ready-made block for your agent config (CLAUDE.md)
• ru/ — the whole thing in R