Hand off and ask

Two sessions often need each other. One has read the whole subsystem; the other is about to change it. Offsite has two moves for that, both on the card’s More Actions menu.

Ask another session

Ask another session asks a question about another session: Offsite reads that session’s transcript and answers from it.

Use it for “what did the other agent conclude about the migration?” without switching cards, re-reading a long scrollback, or interrupting anything. The other session is not touched — it does not even know it was read.

Hand off to a NEW session

Hand off to a NEW session ends the handover the other way round: it starts a fresh session that pulls the current session’s context and continues from there.

Use it when a conversation has grown long, or when the next phase of work deserves a clean slate that still knows what happened. You can add a note describing what the new session should focus on.

Why handoffs go to a new session

Offsite deliberately cannot deliver a message into an existing session.

That capability existed and was removed in August 2026, for a concrete reason: delivering text into a running agent means typing into its terminal, and a terminal is a shared channel. A delivery arriving while the user had a half-written prompt in the same input merged with that draft and was submitted as one prompt, with the user’s authority. No amount of care at the sending end fixes that; the channel itself is the problem.

So the rule is now structural: a session may read another session, never write into one. Handoffs create a new session that pulls context, which has no shared input to collide with.

For agents

An agent running inside an Offsite session can do the read side itself:

offsite agents list       # the user's other agent sessions, with activity
offsite agents context    # another session's transcript, normalized

There is no send. See Offsite for agents.

Details

• agents list reports each visible agent session with an activity of busy, attention or idle, derived from the same turn state that drives notifications.
• Session selectors resolve by id, id prefix, then name; running sessions are matched before stopped ones so a dead session cannot shadow a live one.
• Transcript reads are capped (4 MB tail, blocks trimmed to 2000 characters, tool output to 300) so a huge conversation cannot blow up the caller’s context.
• Reads act as the calling session’s agent, identified by OFFSITE_SESSION_ID — never as one of your paired devices. That keeps a read from being mistaken for you looking at a card, which matters for attention handling.