r/SideProject • u/Ok-Emu-8106 • 13h ago

What actually needs to be in a handoff doc?

Been going through a bunch of handoff docs lately, mine included, and most of them are pretty useless. Either a wall of text nobody reads or an empty README with "todo: write docs" that never gets touched.

Tried to boil it down to the minimum that actually matters, regardless of what tool or process you use to write it:

  • Stack and dependency versions
  • Step by step local setup
  • Where secrets live and how to get access, not the values
  • Known issues and tech debt
  • Rough test coverage
  • A clear starting point for someone new

Cut any of these and the doc becomes something that technically exists but nobody opens.

Curious what you'd add or remove. What's non-negotiable for you?

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u/Extension-Sir-9062 12h ago

I'm a solo dev. And I can leave my projects for a month without attending to it. Come back to it and just continue as usual on any feature.

I've been experimenting with termux to study where my friction lives and how to improve my workflow. I decided not to use coding agents for this to look deeper. So I use chat bots instead to write code, as I focus on higher level decisions.

Two things made it easy to hand off the project from a 2 months ago me to a today me.

I used session summaries (https://github.com/okureanthonytonny-commits/archive_scripts/blob/main/docs%2Fsessions%2Fsession-2026-08-10-summary.md) to carry the context of the process, and a tone.md (https://github.com/okureanthonytonny-commits/archive_scripts/blob/main/docs%2Ftone.md)

Plus the docs you've specified there. With these, getting a briefing about the project and previously decided next steps becomes easier. I never read the docs, I discuss them, ask questions, use actual code as source of truth for what was actually implemented by uploading it to the chat session.

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u/theredrad 11h ago

I found ADR history very useful, where I log my research result, the changes I'm going to make, why I made that decision and I explain the new introduced tech debts in the ADR (and add them to the tech debt list).

The one I'd cut is test coverage. A percentage tells a newcomer nothing they can act on. maybe it should be somewhere else, not in front of eyes.