Retiring and Inheriting a Seat

A planned seat transition. A long-lived seat accumulates context; as it nears the window's edge, don't wait for compaction to degrade you into a cold-started agent, retire deliberately and hand the seat to a fresh successor primed from a packet plus the seat's accumulated lineage. The seat address is stable; its occupants are a lineage. Keep the transition and its authority explicit.

Use this when

• You are a sitting agent near your context threshold (~85%) with a planned transition (or a deliberate role change), and want the successor to start clean.
• You are priming a fresh successor into an existing seat.
• You are recording a tenure in the seat's lineage ledger / writing your tombstone.
• You are inheriting a seat and need the do-not-over-inherit framing.
• You want to consult the agent who sat in this seat before you.

Don't use this when

• Unplanned compaction or a crash already happened, that is the backstop path: session-compaction-and-restore / claude-compaction-restore.
• You need the seat-binding primitive mechanics (rebuild/fork/fresh, the two-outcome honesty model, the provenance schema), seat-continuity-and-handover.
• The seat is fresh with no occupant to retire, rig launch / agent-starters.

Why planned handover beats riding compaction

Compaction is the crash-class backstop (it stays that). A planned handover is deliberate: you author the packet with a clear head before degradation sets in, the successor starts on a clean context, and the transition is auditable. Reach for this at a threshold you can see coming; fall back to compaction only when a transition wasn't planned.

The handover sequence