Agent claims and human handoffs

An agent claim is a vendor-neutral, expiring execution lease on one task. It answers “which connection is actively working on this?” without replacing the human assignee or changing task status.

The normal recipe is:

1. Read the project brief or bounded Context once.
2. Preview one project's eligible queue, or atomically claim the next task when the agent is allowed to select work.
3. Claim a known task with one opaque run ID, or use a unique opaque run ID for the claim-next operation; leases range from 60 seconds to one hour (15 minutes by default).
4. Move the task to the appropriate active status when implementation begins.
5. Renew the lease while work continues; use Waiting when execution pauses for an external dependency.
6. Leave concise Markdown comments for durable decisions, blockers, verification, and handoff evidence.
7. Mark complete only after the requested result is implemented and verified, then release the claim.

A live conflicting claim identifies the owning connection. An expired claim may be taken over. Routine heartbeats do not create noisy activity, while meaningful claim and release changes remain attributable.

For a human handoff, the agent should state what changed, what was verified, any remaining risk, and the exact next action. Source-control links or IDs are useful evidence; raw command logs and secrets are not. If another tracked task concretely blocks progress, record that task relationship instead of only mentioning it in prose.

Current ToDoddle provides a bounded cross-project operational queue, project-scoped eligible-work discovery, atomic claim-next, known-task claims, explicit renew/release operations, and inbox replies. Capability routing, role matching, configurable queue definitions, result history, and reusable orchestration recipes remain roadmap work. Human assignment and task status stay independent from agent selection.