Hand work to another agent or a person

A board is most useful when it leaves the room it was drawn in. staves_export produces several shapes, and picking the wrong one wastes the work.

A scoped prompt, for another agent

export a handoff for the payment work

This is the one people underuse. It builds a prompt scoped to the jobs you name: what the work is, who it is for, the decision gates and checks, what is still unknown, and, when you ask for sources, the files behind it. It is what you paste into a different agent, or a different session, instead of writing four hundred lines of context by hand.

Scope it. A handoff covering the whole board is the same problem as a board covering the whole platform.

Markdown, for people

A prose read of the workflow — who does what, in what order, with the open questions listed. This is what goes in a document, a ticket, or an email to someone who will never open Staves.

JSON, for machines

The board as data. Use it when something else needs to read the structure — a script, a diff between two points in time, an import into another board.

SVG, for the wall

The drawing. staves_export produces SVG; npx @staves/cli pdf [board] --paper=A3 turns a board into a PDF through headless Chrome, and prints a ready-to-print HTML file instead when there is no Chrome to use. Worth more than it sounds: a printed board on a wall gets corrected by people walking past it, which is the cheapest review there is.

What an export is not

An export is a handoff, not a connection. Nothing you do to the exported copy comes back to the board it came from. If you want work to land on the board, the agent needs to be connected and write to it directly.