the agent's shift-handoff notes referenced the wrong campaign after a context overflow; the summary step failed

TL;DR

When a run overflows its context, the model reconstructs from fragments, and two campaigns processed in one run blend into one confident, wrong summary. The defence is to never let identity live in prose: every artefact, note section and summary is stamped with the campaign id by code, the handoff is assembled from per-campaign records stored during the run, and a final consistency check verifies that every claim in the handoff carries the id of the campaign it came from.

the agent's shift-handoff notes referenced the wrong campaign after a context overflow; the summary step failed

Use this when

• Handoff notes describe actions or indicators belonging to a different campaign.
• The errors appear after long runs covering multiple campaigns.

Not for this skill when

• Only one campaign was processed and the notes are wrong. That is a summarisation quality issue, not cross-contamination.
• The notes are correct but filed under the wrong case. That is a filing step bug.

Steps

1. Compare a faulty handoff against the per-campaign records and find where details crossed. Verify: the contamination point is identified.
2. Stamp every intermediate artefact with the campaign id in code at creation time. Verify: no artefact exists without an id.
3. Assemble the handoff from the stored per-campaign records, grouped by id, rather than from the run conversation. Verify: the assembly step reads records, not memory.
4. Add a consistency check that rejects a handoff section whose indicators do not belong to its campaign record. Verify: a planted cross-campaign indicator is caught.
5. Run a multi-campaign shift and review the handoff against records. Verify: every section matches its campaign exactly.

Variant phrasings

shift handoff wrong campaign context overflow agent

The handoff contamination variant.

campaign id stamping agent notes consistency check

The id stamping variant.

Compatibility: Agent frameworks with run storage and structured handoff generation.

Why it happens

Context overflow does not produce silence; it produces fluent reconstruction, which is far more dangerous in a handoff because the next shift acts on it. Identity anchored in code survives overflow; identity carried in narrative does not.

Edge cases / pitfalls

• Handoffs are operational documents. Treat a wrong-campaign handoff as an incident, since actions may have been taken from it.
• Shorter runs bounded to one campaign reduce the class entirely, at some scheduling cost.
• Keep the raw per-campaign records as the source of truth the handoff can always be regenerated from.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_UO1h0WlbhEFAtURkdU1wVw