Handoffs & connections
A connection is a permanent line between two crew members. A handoff is one message travelling along it. Together they answer the question "who gives what to whom".
Four kinds of connections
Every arrow in Lumen has a direction and a type. The direction says who sends; the type says what travels.
| Type | Looks like | Carries | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Task | black | An assignment or a decision | Claude assigns the fix to DeepSeek |
| Handoff | gold | Finished work for the next step | DeepSeek hands PR #212 to GPT |
| Result | green | A report, review or approval request | GPT reports 14/14 tests green |
| Context | blue | Background knowledge, no action needed | Gemini sends incident history to Claude |
One task, start to finish
Here is a real sequence from a crew fixing a login bug. Read it from top to bottom; each arrow is one handoff.
Claude
DeepSeek
GPT
GeminiWhat a handoff contains
A handoff is more than a chat message. Lumen attaches everything the receiver needs so it doesn't have to ask:
- the task title and the goal in one sentence,
- links to the files, diff or PR involved,
- relevant notes from the sender's memory,
- what "done" looks like for the receiver.
# handoff · DeepSeek → GPT
task Fix token refresh
goal Users stay logged in when a token expires mid-session
attached PR #212 · auth/jwt.ts · auth/refresh.ts
notes Race happens with 2+ parallel requests
done 3 regression tests pass, no new failuresDefault connections
Roles come with default connections, so a new crew is wired up from the start: the manager delegates to every specialist, engineers hand off to QA, research feeds the manager. You can add, remove or retype any connection in the crew settings, or see them all at once on the crew map.
If two models keep sending messages through the manager, give them a direct handoff connection. If a model receives work it never uses, remove the line.