On-call Handoff
Produce a tight on-call handoff from recent pages, deploys, open incidents, and unfinished threads. Use at shift change, Friday wrap, or when asked to write the on-call notes.
Copy the file into your agent runtime. Cursor loads personal skills from ~/.cursor/skills/on-call-handoff/SKILL.md and project skills from .cursor/skills/on-call-handoff/SKILL.md. Claude Code looks in .claude/skills/on-call-handoff/SKILL.md.
On-call Handoff
When to use
One engineer is going off rotation and the next needs the state of the world in under two minutes. Triggers: write the handoff, on-call notes, what's on fire.
What it does
Compresses the last shift into: open incidents, pages that mattered, deploys in flight, risks to watch, and a single "if this pages, do this" list.
Steps
- List open incidents first. Status, next action, owner.
- List pages in the window that were real vs noise (one line each).
- List deploys or flag flips that are not fully baked.
- Name the top 3 watch items for the next 12 hours.
- Attach runbook links only if they were provided or exist in-repo. Do not invent URLs.
Output
Open: - ... Noise vs signal: - ... In flight: - ... Watch: - ... If this pages: ...
Guardrails
Never mark an incident resolved unless the input says it recovered. Never invent a runbook link. Keep the whole handoff under 400 words.