That was my experience in the Opus 4.5 - 4.7 era, but recently it's been on the nose with what I want it to carry over, or close enough that a full handoff would be more expensive than just letting it find what it needs again.
I'm mostly working on moderately sized rust codebases (600k~ lines) with reasonably long running tasks. The only time I intentionally do a handoff is if the next goal is in an entirely different section of the code, or I let the session cache expire, or I'm working with 6.1 Sol for more than a few hours, which admittedly has some horrendous context drift compared to Opus.
I'm mostly working on moderately sized rust codebases (600k~ lines) with reasonably long running tasks. The only time I intentionally do a handoff is if the next goal is in an entirely different section of the code, or I let the session cache expire, or I'm working with 6.1 Sol for more than a few hours, which admittedly has some horrendous context drift compared to Opus.