Test any collaborative system by refusing the transition meeting. If stepping into an ongoing project requires an explanatory call, the work is not in progress; it is merely trapped inside private memory.
The scarce skill in human and agent collaboration is not managing agents or training people. It is making work legible enough that either side can pick it up mid-stride.
A new analyst inherits a sequel repository midway through an investigation. If the prior contributor left only scripts and intent, the handoff fails immediately. The execution instructions are lost in a private chat; the domain skills exist only as uncommitted local helpers; the hierarchy of open questions is unrecorded; and the sequel branch lacks the failing test that would define the next step. Handed that directory, a new analyst spends days reverse-engineering what was already tried, while an agent initialized on the root folder promptly drifts. Both fail for the exact same reason: the repository was treated as an archive for finished artifacts rather than a living operational surface.
Openness is the collaboration primitive. The handoff unit is not a status memo or an issue ticket; it is the living repository itself. Git remains the real bridge between human reasoning and machine context because plain text—code, configuration, and markdown—is where both operate symmetrically. A diff does not care who or what authored a commit; it only records the delta against reality.
Because day-to-day execution lives openly in the tree, onboarding collapses. The ritual of shadowing peers and decoding unwritten practice shrinks to two mechanical essentials: provisioning the environment and knowing who owns what. If the full state of an effort—its working assumptions, its tools, its unresolved edges—is checked into the files, continuity ceases to be an emergency.
There is a clean boundary. Political alignment, ethical liability, trust between teams, and the judgment of which bets are worth making remain strictly human-to-human. That boundary is not an engineering gap waiting to be automated away; it is where artifact-based execution ends and institutional responsibility begins. The handoff is an artifact, not an org chart.
Everything short of that line belongs in the open record. If either side cannot pick it up, it was never a handoff.