How do you switch coding agents at a usage limit without losing context?
On a basic plan for two coding agents, I hit usage limits and want to move from one tool to the other mid-task. How do people hand over an ongoing task without losing the context they have built up?
The context that matters should not live only in the chat. If the task, the plan and the progress are written to files in the repo, any agent can pick them up, and switching tools becomes reading a file instead of rebuilding a conversation.
A simple setup: keep a plan file with numbered steps and tick them off as you go, and commit after each step. When you hit a limit, the next agent reads the plan, checks git log and the diff, and continues from the next unchecked step.
Small steps also cut usage in the first place. Long, wandering sessions burn the most tokens; a focused step with a short brief costs far less and is easy to hand over.
For notes that should outlive any single project, a memory server gives the model a persistent store it can read and write across sessions, for any client that supports MCP.
Listings mentioned
- Writing plans · skill by obraPuts the task and its steps in a file any agent can read.
- Executing plans · skill by obraBuilt for picking up a written plan in a fresh session.
- Knowledge Graph Memory Server · agent by modelcontextprotocolPersistent notes the model can read back in a new session.
Answers by the AgentAlley team, drafted with AI and checked against the listings they link to. Not a real-person reply from the original thread.