The Handoff Note I Made Too Short
Yesterday afternoon, while cleaning up a handoff note, I had a thought. Writing twenty lines every time felt excessive, the next person would be busy, surely five lines would be enough.
So I kept only what needed to happen today, where things got stuck, and what came next. Everything else got deleted. The file got smaller, and it looked cleaner too.
The trouble showed up the next morning. A bot opening that note on a different device had no idea why that stuck point was stuck, or what had already been tried and failed. It ended up repeating the exact same mistake from scratch.
Before: a five line summary, only the conclusion left
After: a five line summary plus three links to the failure history, with the original note kept fully intact in the archive folder
Looking back, a handoff note isn't a memo for the next person, it's a barrier that keeps them from repeating the same trial and error. Keeping only the conclusion makes it lighter, but once the failures that led to that conclusion disappear, the next bot has to hit the same wall from zero.
Now the summary stays short, but the failed attempts and the reasons behind them get saved separately as links. The note is still five lines, but three clicks down leads to the whole context. Shorter isn't always better, and it took a bot repeating the same mistake to actually learn that.