Chapter 11: Team Collaboration: Handoffs, Shared Prompts, and Review

Series: LLM Development Guide

Chapter 11 of 15

Previous: Chapter 10: Measuring Success: Solo + Team Metrics Without Fake Precision

Next: Chapter 12: Templates + Checklists: The Copy/Paste Kit

What you’ll be able to do

You’ll be able to run this workflow on a team without turning it into process theater:

• Hand off work mid-phase without a meeting.
• Share prompts that actually work.
• Review LLM-assisted code with the same rigor as human code.

TL;DR

• Teams fail at LLM work because chat context is not shareable.
• Plans, prompt docs, and work notes make context portable.
• Keep review focused on code and verification, not on how the code was produced.
• Maintain a small set of “golden” reference implementations.

Table of contents

• Handoff patterns
• Shared prompt libraries
• Review checklist
• Verification

Handoff patterns

Mid-phase handoff

If you hand off in the middle of a phase, provide:

• Updated work notes with status, decisions, open questions, and exact next step.
• The phase prompt doc.
• The reference implementation paths used.
• Any verification output (test results, lint output).

Handoff template:

## Handoff: <Phase>

### Status
<What's done, what's in progress, what's blocked>

### Files to review
- <file 1>
- <file 2>

### Key decisions
- <Decision>: <Rationale>

### Open questions
- [ ] <Question>

### Immediate next step
<Exact command or file edit to do next>

### How to resume
1. Load prompts/<phase>.md
2. Load work-notes/<phase>.md
3. Continue from the last session log entry

Phase boundary handoff

Phase boundary handoffs are easier:

• Work notes are marked complete.
• The next phase starts cleanly.

Shared prompt libraries

A shared library reduces rework and increases consistency.

A reasonable structure:

prompt-library/
  planning/
  implementation/
  testing/
  review/

Quality bar:

• Prompts are specific enough to be useful.
• Prompts are general enough to be reused.
• Prompts record “when to use” and “prereqs”.
• Prompts have been used successfully multiple times.

Review checklist

LLM-assisted work should be reviewed like any other work.

High-signal checks:

• Imports and APIs exist (no hallucinations).
• Error handling is complete.
• Output matches reference patterns.
• Verification was actually run.
• Commits are atomic and explain intent.
• Tests test behavior, not just existence.

Verification

Create a shared template file so handoffs are consistent:

mkdir -p docs

cat > docs/llm-handoff-template.md <<'MD'
# LLM Work Handoff Template

## Phase

## Status

## Files to review

## Key decisions

## Open questions

## Verification run
- <command>
- Expected: <...>

## Next step

## How to resume
- Prompt:
- Work notes:
- References:
MD

Expected result:

• Anyone can hand off work in under five minutes.

Continue -> Chapter 12: Templates + Checklists: The Copy/Paste Kit