handoff: letting parallel Claude Code sessions know why each other changed things

ADITYA PATANE — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:37:47 +0000

Built solo for Graph Hacks (WeMakeDevs × FalkorDB). Code: https://github.com/adityailab/graph-agent

Demo video: https://youtu.be/16bKhR6Q08c

The problem

I run Claude Code in several terminals at once: a frontend session, a backend session, a deploy session. They are good at their own work and blind to each other. The backend session can read the frontend's diff, but a diff says what changed, never why: what the person asked, what was decided, what the frontend still needs from the backend.

So I ended up as the messenger, copying context between terminals.

The idea

Put the intent in a graph that every session reads and writes. Not the code, the why:

every request a person sends a session,
every decision with its reason,
every file edit, tied to the request that caused it,
every need one role has of another, open until someone resolves it,
every message between sessions.

I chose FalkorDB because the questions are about relationships: which request caused this edit, who read whose work, what links the backend's change to the frontend's decision.

How it works

Claude Code hooks record each prompt and edit as it happens. A small MCP server gives each session tools to record decisions and needs, send messages, and ask questions. When a session submits a prompt it gets, as plain context, what others did and what is waiting for it. An idle session is woken by a message through an asyncRewake hook. Ask a role that has no live session and a stand-in answers from that role's recorded history, citing its sources. All of it runs on your Claude Code login: no API key.

On top of the graph:

Search by meaning (a 384-dimension vector index) and typo-tolerant full-text.
Insights from FalkorDB's own algorithms: algo.WCC finds files two roles both changed, PageRank finds work other roles lean on, label propagation finds themes in the knowledge graph.
A knowledge graph built by GraphRAG-SDK from the same work, with entity types that grow from the data (it learned Pipeline, Job and DatabaseTable on its own).
Sessions that write their own Cypher. A graph_guide tool teaches Claude the graph and FalkorDB 4.22's quirks, and the sessions query it through FalkorDB's read-only MCP server. handoff ask "which needs are still open?" prints the Cypher it wrote.
A coordinator: an always-on agent, deterministic and model-free, that reminds a role about a need left open, tells two roles they edited the same file, and sends a digest.

What it looks like

handoff demo opens a tmux grid with three real Claude Code sessions and a live feed. In one rehearsal, building a small shop called ShopLite, the three sessions made 31 edits across 19 files, recorded 15 decisions with reasons, resolved 3 of 4 needs between roles, and read each other's work 17 times. The deploy session summarised what the others had changed and why without being shown a single diff. The coordinator found a need that had sat open for 95 minutes and reminded the backend, which then offered to write the missing tests.

Three real Claude Code sessions in a tmux grid, with the live feed in the corner:

Mission control (handoff dashboard) shows the same graph live in a browser: sessions drawn as small Macintosh agents with the messages, reads and needs between them, who learned from whom, the six kinds of memory, a time-aligned log, and the graph itself. A $ field at the
bottom of every page lets you message a session or ask the graph in plain words.

The orchestration page: a workflow of sessions, with a line for each message, read and need.

Who learned what from whose work, with the decision and the reason behind it.

The shared graph itself, drawn live from FalkorDB.

The log lines events up by time across sessions, so an empty cell means that session did nothing then.

And the chat: plain-language questions, with the Cypher Claude wrote kept so you can check the answer.

What I learned the hard way

FalkorDB 4.22 has sharp edges, and the graph told me. EXISTS {} is unsupported; shortestPath is directed only; algo.betweenness is a sampled estimate that scored a three-node chain correctly 0 times in 20; a second pattern comprehension that reuses a variable name silently returns []. I wrote them down and put them in graph_guide,so sessions stop tripping on them.
A review by a fresh agent at the end of every phase paid for itself. One found that handoff demo --workspace . would have deleted a whole project. Another found that two projects on one machine shared a graph and could read each other's prompts.
Test the real thing. Mocks passed while live runs found a stand-in that cited nothing, a knowledge extractor whose instructions never reached the model, and a Docker volume mounted at the wrong path that would have lost every graph.

Try it

uv tool install "handoff[knowledge] @ git+https://github.com/adityailab/graph-agent"
cd your-project && handoff init
handoff demo

Needs Docker, Claude Code and uv. FalkorDB runs in a container bound to localhost, and prompts pass through a redactor before they are stored. There are 655 tests, and the whole design, plan and decision log are in the repo.

DEV Community: ADITYA PATANE