You built the product yourself, with AI, nights and weekends, at prompt speed. It worked: there are users, there is revenue, and now there is an engineer starting Monday whose first job is to own a codebase no professional has ever read. This handover is unusual because you are not leaving. You are converting yourself from builder to founder, and the code has to survive the conversion.
Your engineer clones the repository and starts forming the picture every engineer forms: what is this, how does it run, what can I trust. In an AI-built codebase that picture assembles slowly and suspiciously, because the usual trail, commit discipline, review threads, design notes, is thin, and the code has the uncanny evenness of generated work. So they interrupt you, constantly, in your busiest month, or worse, they do not, and quietly conclude the codebase needs rewriting. First engineers propose rewrites in direct proportion to how little they can verify about what exists.
Before they start, run the CLI on the product. The passport it generates is the onboarding document you do not have time to write: the real architecture as the repository shows it, setup executed from clean so day one is not spent fighting the dev environment, the decision log recovered from your agent sessions, and the labelled truth about what was verified versus what the agent merely said. Give them the example passport beforehand so they know what they are getting, then the real one, then the keys.
The unknowns section does the most work here. Every founder codebase has haunted corners; listing them turns your engineer’s discovery of each one from evidence the founder does not know what he built into item eleven on the agreed list. It also gives their first quarter an honest backlog, which beats a speculative rewrite on every axis a founder cares about.
There is a quieter benefit. Your engineer can run npx mantyl receiveand watch the recorded checks reproduce on their machine, which answers the question they were too polite to ask: does this actually work, or does it work on your laptop. And you, handing over root access to your company’s codebase, get a fixed record of its verified state on the day ownership shifted, which is a useful thing to possess if conversations ever get complicated. The full list of what to transfer around the code, credentials, services, operational knowledge, is the handover checklist; the promotion path where a whole team inherits the product is prototype to production.