Collection

An agent can only act on what it can see. Collection is the discipline of putting the right material in front of it: the meeting transcripts where a decision actually got made, the code and its git history, the wiki or knowledge base, the epics and tickets that say what the work is for.

Give an agent all of this from day one and it orients itself. Your team stops re-explaining and stops chasing down what the agent missed, and the work starts from what is true rather than what the agent guessed: fewer wrong turns, less rework, decisions that land right the first time.

Exploratory

People grab whatever artifacts they think the agent needs, with no shared standard. It is where every team starts.

Enables

The cheapest look at what your agents actually need. Every session someone hand-feeds shows which artifacts an agent reached for and which it ignored, the knowledge a durable setup gets built from.

Deficiencies

Critical artifacts get missed and stale ones get pulled in, and no one can say what is actually available.

Cost to maintain

The quiet tax of re-gathering the same context, session after session.

Expert-led

One engineer knows which artifacts matter and curates them for everyone else.

Enables

Consistent gathering and a foundation the team can rely on.

Deficiencies

A single point of failure. Their judgment is not written down, and nothing works well while they are out.

Cost to maintain

That person's time, spent curating and teaching.

Documented

The expert's list is written down. The team knows what to gather and where to find it.

Enables

Consistency across projects, new hires who follow the playbook, and a practice that survives the expert leaving.

Deficiencies

Still manual. It depends on people following it, and gaps open whenever the artifacts change.

Cost to maintain

Writing the playbook once, then the ongoing work of keeping it current.

Structural

Artifacts are pulled in automatically. The agent always opens with what it needs.

Enables

No manual gathering, consistency across every repo, and a corpus that grows the moment something new appears.

Deficiencies

Bad rules pull in noise or stale data, and the connectors are real software that has to be built and owned.

Cost to maintain

Building the connectors and capture hooks, then maintaining them as APIs, tools, and repos change.

Collection rarely stands alone. Where it overlaps a sibling discipline, an investment on one side quietly depends on the other. The Context domain page lays these out in full.

• Collection and Management

  Collection gets an artifact in the door; Management keeps it true. The wider Collection reaches, the more surface Management has to hold current, and gathering aggressively without the upkeep just delivers stale context at scale.

  Fund both and a broad corpus stays trustworthy; fund only the first and you have paid to mislead the agent faster.

• Collection and Disclosure

  Collection decides what exists for the agent to see; Disclosure decides what actually reaches a given session. A complete corpus is only an asset if the routing can find the one slice a task needs inside it, and one dumped whole is worse than a small, well-aimed one.

  The value is in the pair: gather widely, then serve narrowly.