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Lesson 04 of 04 · published

Handoff Is Resume If Idle, Not a Live Steal

~12 min · handoff, smolder, resume

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The Terminal Gets the Notebook, Not the Turn

Local handoff to Smolder is a shutdown of an idle, retained, resumable Mac session with no queued work. The app waits for the child to actually exit, then publishes an owner-only request. Smolder starts firebrand resume <ulid> --if-idle. That resume uses the existing record lock with take=False. A racing writer causes refusal, never epoch takeover. No prompt is submitted. No unresolved tool is replayed. Recorded model, workspace, endpoint, and history remain the resume authority.

Ordinary explicit CLI resume keeps its existing take semantics. Gateway session.resume of a live slot is last-opener-wins: the surface is taken, the loser gets session.taken, and the old writer's next append fails closed. That is not live-turn migration. The in-flight model stream does not move rooms. A phone can take a live gateway session. It cannot migrate the streaming turn as a product. Smolder local handoff stays the opposite: idle only, take=False.

Idle resume, no take. Handoff is how a notebook changes rooms. It is not how a writer is evicted mid-sentence.

Smolder Teaches the Terminal Side

smolder-quest owns the terminal vessel. This page owns Firebrand's side of the handshake: eligibility, teardown, --if-idle, and the refusal when someone else is already writing. If you need the terminal's job, go there. If you need the engine's job, stay here.

Code

The handoff resume, and what it refuses·bash
firebrand resume <ulid> --if-idle
# take=False: a racing writer -> refuse, never steal the epoch
# no prompt, no unresolved tool replay
# recorded model / workspace / endpoint win

External links

Exercise

Write two attempts at the same ULID: Smolder starts --if-idle while the Mac child is still exiting. Name the legal winner. If both win, you invented a second writer.
Hint
The lock refuses the racer. The record stays resumable. Failures report recovery.

Progress

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