Disclosure

Your agent can have everything it needs gathered and current and still drown in it. Disclosure is the discipline of matching what you serve to the task at hand: a focused set of requirements rather than every doc in the repo, an index that routes the agent to the one file it needs rather than pasting all of them in, an orientation note that points, not dumps. It covers picking up where the last session stopped, too: a fresh session starts empty, and re-priming it with the state of the work lets the agent resume instead of starting over.

When a session carries only what the task calls for, the agent reaches an answer faster, and you spend less per run because the context window stays lean: fewer tokens, fewer wrong turns, decisions that land the first time.

Exploratory

People paste in whatever they have, or start the agent cold with almost nothing.

Enables

Zero setup, and a fast read on what a task actually needs in front of it. Overstuffing and starving sessions by hand is how you learn which slices matter, before you build anything to route them.

Deficiencies

The agent drowns in an overstuffed window or guesses from a starved one, and either way it misreads the task. Every new session starts cold, re-deriving what the last one already knew.

Cost to maintain

Tokens burned on irrelevant context, plus the rework when the agent acts on what it skimmed past.

Expert-led

One engineer is good at feeding the agent just enough in the right order, and the knack lives with them.

Enables

The sessions that engineer touches run lean and well-aimed.

Deficiencies

A single point of failure whose judgment is unwritten, while everyone else still dumps or starves.

Cost to maintain

Their time hand-curating each session's context and correcting the sessions that went wide.

Documented

“Link the index, don't paste the file” is written down, and the team knows to route rather than dump.

Enables

Consistent disclosure across the team, a habit new hires inherit, and a practice that survives the expert leaving.

Deficiencies

Still applied unevenly and dependent on people following it, and an out-of-date index sends the agent to the wrong file.

Cost to maintain

Writing the routing layer and the convention, plus keeping the indexes pointed at the right files.

Structural

Progressive disclosure is built into the system: the agent loads orientation first and pulls deeper context only when a task calls for it.

Enables

Efficient context by default rather than by talent, the same disclosure path everywhere, and windows that stay small without losing reach.

Deficiencies

A mis-tuned index or auto-load can route the agent wrong or withhold what it needs, and it takes real engineering to stand up.

Cost to maintain

Building and tuning the indexes and auto-loaded files, plus propagating them as the repo changes.

Disclosure 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.

• Disclosure and Collection

  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.

• Disclosure and Management

  Management makes sure an artifact is still true; Disclosure makes sure the agent reads it at the right moment. The leanest, best-routed context is still wrong if it points at a doc that went stale months ago.

  Currency without routing buries the truth; routing without currency delivers a falsehood on time.