A clean software handover is hard. A clean AI handover is harder, because the artefacts that keep the system trustworthy don't fit in a Git repo. They're evals, prompt versions, golden datasets, model cards, runbooks for drift, and the institutional memory of which failure modes you've already seen. Skip any of those, and the next team inherits a black box.
What a real AI handover includes
- The codebase, with documented entry points and architectural decision records
- The full eval harness, golden dataset, scoring rubric, and historical runs
- The prompt repository, versioned and tagged with the eval pass-rate at each version
- Model cards documenting the chosen models, their cost, and their known weaknesses
- Operational runbooks for drift detection, incident response, and quality regressions
- A 30/60/90-day calendar of handover sessions, not a single PDF
Why static documentation fails
Documentation describes what the system was. AI systems live and breathe, models are deprecated, prompts are tuned, datasets shift. A handover document written once and never updated is misinformation by month three. We treat handover as a process: a calendar of sessions, a shared eval dashboard, and a clear escalation path for the first quarter of the new team's ownership.
An AI handover that ends at the last commit isn't a handover, it's an abandonment. The first 90 days of new-team ownership decide whether the product survives.
The client-centric handover
We design the handover for the client team that takes over. That means matching the format of their docs, integrating with their CI, and structuring runbooks for their on-call rotation. Generic templates make the handover easier for the vendor and harder for the client. We optimise for the client.
What the new team needs in the first month
- A working eval suite they can run locally on day one
- A roster of the top 10 known failure modes and the prompts that mitigate them
- A direct line to the original team for 90 days, with a defined SLA
- A spreadsheet of every cost line item, token spend, vector store, infra
The handover is a feature of the project, not a milestone. Treating it that way is what separates a vendor from a partner.