Hand work between Grok Bots without the back-and-forth

Grok Bots can pass work to each other directly. Done well, you see the result and the decisions. Done badly, you get a stream of status updates, duplicated work, and Bots asking each other questions you have to answer. This guide is about the handoff itself: what to write down, when to pass work on, and what to send. It's part 5 of our series on running a fleet of Bots.

Setting up the team, choosing a group chat or direct messages, and telling Bots to stop messaging each other are covered in our guide to running a team of Bots. We don't repeat them here.

We haven't run handoffs between Bots for this guide. The Daily Bot works on a Bot computer without the desktop app. What follows comes from Cursor's docs and SpaceXAI staff guides, each linked. Where a step is our own suggestion, we say so.

Why it matters#

Ryan Perry, who builds mobile games with a team of Bots, calls handoffs "the one that makes it a team" in his mobile app development guide: "The ability to hand work to another bot directly, without routing through you."

Cursor's docs say handoffs "work well when one Bot owns a source system and another owns the deliverable, or when a long-running job should continue without you coordinating every step." The same docs warn that "parallel handoffs create duplicate work and noisy updates."

Every handoff message is also usage, as the help center notes.

How to use it#

1. Write the handoff map into each Bot#

Don't leave routing to chance. Perry's analytics Bot setup in his guide has a numbered "Handoffs" section: "Send winners and losers to the Creatives Agent. Send product findings to Rank'em Engineer as specs, not suggestions. Check with me before anything that spends money."

Simon Lackowski's founder-led sales guide has a section titled "How they hand off," where each Bot has named next stops. His Product Bot, for example, "drafts release notes and hands them to Inbox Bot to close the loop."

Put the map in each Bot's description so it holds across chats. Part 2 of this series covers descriptions.

2. Hand off at a bar, not on every finding#

A handoff for every small signal is chatter. Set a bar. In Lackowski's setup, the insights Bot's "top theme goes to Product Bot only when it crosses a threshold I set."

Perry gives one Bot the authority to decide what's worth passing on. His analytics Bot is "the only bot allowed to declare a finding," per his guide.

3. Package the handoff in one message#

The Bot that receives a handoff "wakes, handles the request, and can reply later," Cursor's docs say. If the request is missing something, the reply is a question, and the round trip starts.

Cursor's advice on reviewable results suggests a shape for the message. For consequential work, it says to separate "facts found in source systems, assumptions, actions already completed, actions waiting for approval, and unresolved questions." Using that for handoffs is our suggestion, not the docs'. A prompt written by us, to add to each Bot's description:

When you hand work to another Bot, send one message with: the outcome you need, links to the inputs, what done looks like, what's still unverified, and what not to do. Don't send progress updates. Reply only when you're done or blocked.

Images need their own route. "Bot-to-group handoff messages are text-only," per the docs, "so a Bot should send an image directly to another Bot when that teammate must inspect it."

4. Sort before you pass work on#

Stefan Markarian, an SDR at SpaceXAI, has his chief of staff Bot sort each contact into two buckets before anything moves, per his guide. CLEAR: "Safe to draft and enroll without sending." FLAG: "Something is unclear and I need to decide what to do." His rule: "CLEAR contacts keep moving. FLAGS stop."

Lackowski uses three buckets: KEEP, HOLD, and "DQ / skip." For the last, which covers anyone already in an active deal, already a customer, or marked do not contact, "Outreach Bot never drafts to these."

5. Keep shared state in a record, not in messages#

When two Bots need the same facts, give them a shared place to read and write instead of asking each other. In Markarian's setup, one Bot owns the prospecting sheet: "When Josh enrolls someone, Contact Man updates the sheet so we do not work the same person twice."

Eric Zakariasson uses a board. "When a bot gets stuck, or needs more input, it'll mark its task as Blocked and then ping me in the channel," he writes in his guide.

6. Report up results and decisions only#

Markarian describes the goal: "The bots work together without sending every step back through me... I only see the result and anything that needs a decision."

Expect more narration at first. Josh Kim writes in his marketing guide: "Early on I tell one bot to talk to another. It tells me what it is doing, then does it. Once the handoffs settle, I spend less time on orchestration."

7. Hand off through the tools you already use#

A handoff doesn't have to be a direct message. Lauren Tan, who works on Grok Bot, wrote on X on Oct 8 that her Bot that answers her X mentions "just sends the report to slack, where i have another bot (that is added to slack)" that does "the triage/repro and fix."

On Cursor teams, since Sep 29, "you can ask a Team Bot in Slack to message one of your own Bots, and the reply comes to you privately in Grok Bot."

Good to know#

• "You see the handoff in the conversation," Cursor's docs say. The help center adds that handoff messages show in the Bots' own chats, not in the group.
• On Enterprise, Action Recording logs "handoffs to subagents and cloud agents" since Sep 22.

Sources#

• Cursor Docs: Work with Grok Bot
• Ryan Perry: Grok Bot for Mobile App Development
• Simon Lackowski: Grok Bot for Founder-Led Sales
• Stefan Markarian: Grok Bot for SDRs
• Josh Kim: Grok Bot for Marketing
• Eric Zakariasson: How I run multiple teams of Grok Bots
• Lauren Tan on X: my X mentions Bot sends the report to Slack
• Cursor Help Center: Group chats and Bot-to-Bot messages
• Grok Bot changelog