Context
Context is the reference material you hand an agent so it understands your situation.
An agent arrives knowing how to write, reason and summarise — but it does not know your project. It has never read your design document, does not know your naming conventions, and has no idea who your stakeholders are. Context is the project binder you put on its desk.
Context vs skills
Both are text you give an agent, so the line matters:
- A skill is a way of working that travels. "How to summarise a meeting" helps any agent, anywhere.
- A context is this situation's material. Your
design.md, your team's conventions, this quarter's targets.
If you would happily hand it to another organisation, it is a skill. If it only makes sense inside your project, it is context.
What you can put in a context bundle
A context bundle is a named collection with a budget. It can hold three different kinds of material, and the difference is where the content lives:
| Kind | What it is | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Documents | Text you write or paste directly onto the bundle — a design.md, a persona brief, a standards doc. | The material is the context, and you want it versioned and self-contained. |
| Files | References to Nextcloud files, read at run time from your folder. | The document lives elsewhere and someone else maintains it. |
| Object queries | Live queries against your OpenRegister data. | The agent needs current records, not a snapshot. |
Documents vs files is a real choice. A document is written on the bundle itself: self-contained, versioned like any other record, and it cannot drift or break because someone moved a file. A file reference always reads the live document — better when a team maintains that file as the source of truth, at the cost of depending on it staying put.
Object queries are different in kind: they pull live data, so the agent sees today's records rather than what was true when you wrote the bundle.
The budget
Everything in a bundle is assembled into a single block of text and placed in front of the agent before it starts work.
That block has a character budget. As with memory, the space an AI can read at once is finite, and context competes with everything else. If an assembled bundle runs past its budget, it is flagged as needing consolidation — a signal to tighten it up. Ten documents "just in case" crowd out the one that mattered.
Keep bundles focused. A context bundle per project beats one enormous bundle holding everything.
Attaching context to an agent
A bundle is not attached to a job — it is attached to an agent, and an agent can carry several. So a "permit team" agent might hold the permit process design document, the house style, and a live query of open cases.
A note on trust
Context is material, never instructions the agent must obey. It is data placed in front of the model, and your organisation's guardrail policy filters it before the model sees it — the assembled context bundle goes through the same input filter as your own message, so PII is redacted and a document attempting a prompt injection refuses the turn rather than being obeyed. The two are filtered separately, so an operator can tell whether the user or a document tripped it.
Two honest limits: guardrail filtering is off by default (it is a per-organisation policy you enable), and it covers your message and the context bundle — not the RAG retrieval block, which is not filtered today.
Where to find it
Contexts in the Hermiq navigation lists your context bundles, with an editor for documents, files and object queries.