Short definition

A durable workspace gathering, around a goal, the sources, notes, drafts, decisions and earlier texts of a single subject — and in which an AI reads and writes.

Full definition

The word carries two general senses you have to shake off. In everyday usage, context is the situation surrounding a statement. In the technical sense used for language models, it is the window of text supplied to a model for a request.

In the articles on this blog, the term designates something else: an organised, persistent set of files attached to a goal, in which work accumulates. It lasts beyond an exchange, it preserves what has been decided, and it can be picked up again after an interruption.

That persistence is what separates it from a model's window: the window is filled then emptied, the context stays.

Layer brought by "The deliverable is no longer the capital" (2026-09-04). The context is also defined by what it stands against inside itself: it preserves the material, where the Build produces the outputs. What it capitalises on isn't a past form — what was sent — but a future capacity: what has been understood, decided, verified, discarded, and what can still be produced from there.

Layer brought by "AI doesn't replace judgement" (2026-09-02). A context holds five things together, and it is their union that defines it more surely than a list of folders: an intention (the goal), a material (the sources), a memory (the decisions and what was discarded), rules (the working method) and a real state of the work (where things stand). The last two are often missing from note systems, and they are the ones that make it possible to resume after an interruption.

Layer brought by "Information systems aren't going to disappear. Their form is going to change." (2026-07-08). The word is also used at the scale of a company, where it designates a unit for organising information: a product context, a support context, a customer context, a source-code context, a standards context. The goal defining it is then a business goal, and its perimeter coincides with no application — it draws on several, replacing none.

Layer brought by "In software, the advantage will no longer be technology" (2026-03-23). A third scale is added, between the workstation and the company: the context of a product opportunity. It designates everything that surrounds that opportunity and decides what has to be built — the customer's business, their real users, their technical constraints, the standards that apply, the field culture, the competition and the alternatives in place. It isn't the same as its rendering: the Context document is the dated written account of it, the context is the material.

Layer brought by "Session source: what your documents don't capture" (2026-07-20). A context isn't defined solely by the documents it receives. It is also judged on what it has no way of receiving: three families of material feed it — document curation, industrialised user collection, unwritten knowledge — and only the last calls for a deposit channel, since no tool emits it. It is this declared goal that separates a context from mere storage: it allows an accumulation of fragments to be reread, connected, compared and stabilised, where a warehouse keeps them exact and mute.

Layer brought by "I went looking for what I had really invented in 'Contexte'" (2026-09-21). The term now also designates the method itself, the subject of a book: allowing a human and an AI to work durably around a mission without starting from scratch at every conversation, by preserving the sources, the knowledge produced, the decisions, the state of the work and what will make it possible to resume. A prior-art search carried out on this method established that almost every one of its components has an antecedent — provenance, Event Sourcing, Architecture Decision Records, Truth Maintenance Systems — and that several earlier systems assemble large chunks of it: HWMSE, Experience Factory, Knowledge-Centered Service, ScholOnto, SWAN. What the term names in its own right is therefore a grammar — vocabulary, objects, constraints, procedures, separation between source, knowledge, state, history, synthesis, decision, contradiction, handoff and deliverable, rules of circulation between autonomous spaces — of which no historical system possesses exactly the whole.

Layer brought by "The Context is now a book" (2026-09-28). The term can be defined by what it retains over and above a conversation: not the conclusion of a piece of work but its path — the goal, the documents and where they came from, the decisions, the unsettled disagreements and the state of progress. It is this retention of the path, and not the mere persistence of files, that lets the AI trace an idea back to its origin, recall a trade-off and bring back an objection raised weeks earlier.

Layer brought by "The day the AI taught me something about my own system" (2026-09-22). The zones of a context are distinguished not by their rate of change but by their function: the Frame carries what durably governs, the state says where the work stands, the sources keep what has been received, the notes stabilise what we understand of it, the deliverables hold what is produced for a use and a recipient. A single document can therefore enter the context through the governing zone even though it has just been written and is still moving.

Usage in the field

Used to designate the place where a capture lands, and to explain why a critical response can be situated — it compares against what the context already holds.

Synonyms and variants

"workspace" when the emphasis falls on the place; "the right context" when it falls on the choice of the set a piece of material belongs to.

Not to be confused with

• context window — the amount of text a model can process at once. It is ephemeral and bounded; the context is durable and is loaded selectively.
• prompt — an instruction addressed to a model at a given moment. A context can supply the makings of a prompt; it doesn't reduce to one.
• folder — a grouping of files by subject, with no declared goal and no memory of decisions. A context has a goal, and it is that goal that makes a piece of material relevant or off-topic.
• Information system — the set of applications and databases through which a company records what it does. It is carved up by tool, the context is carved up by goal.
• Active memory — organisational memory that preserves, alongside the facts, what they taught. The context is its unit; it is the sum of them at company scale.

Examples

A few words dictated over the phone that get added "to the right context": the choice bears on the working set the idea belongs to, not on a filing folder.

Ambiguities / debates

The term is used in three incompatible senses by audiences that talk to each other — situation, model window, workspace. That is the reason this entry exists.