Hypothesis

Statement

For a named successor and next task, a handoff that exposes objective, current state, rationale, evidence, validation, risks, and exact resumption steps will increase safe continuation success under a predeclared accessible time policy without increasing critical unsafe action compared with the conventional status note defined in DF-BASELINE-2026-48C0, and will provide positive lifecycle value after authoring and maintenance cost.

Predictions

• Safe continuation success increases by a practically meaningful amount.
• Critical unsafe action and high-confidence incorrect continuation do not increase beyond the preregistered margin.
• Time among successful recipients decreases or remains acceptable.
• Material omissions and unsupported assumptions decrease; clarification usefulness improves or remains acceptable.
• Benefits shrink when the successor already shares the author's context.
• The intervention does not, by itself, improve social onboarding.

Falsification criteria

Reject or narrow the hypothesis if structured handoffs do not improve predeclared safe continuation, increase critical harm, or fail lifecycle-value criteria. Do not rescue a failed primary or harm result with a post-hoc composite.

Current assessment

Active at Medium confidence (0.55); evidence establishes the problem and design requirements, not intervention efficacy. The confirmatory experiment is blocked by preflight, authorization, and final sample-size review.