The irreducibility test
Some context an agent can work out.
Some it never will.
Before anything reaches your coding agent, ask one question: could it derive this from the repo? If yes, sending it wastes budget and dilutes attention. What’s left is the only context worth sending — and the only context we hold.
It can derive this — don’t send it
Everything in the code
- Architecture and file layout
- API shapes and data models
- Naming and code conventions
- Test framework and how to run it
- How the project is organised
- Anything a search answers in one call
It can never derive this — we hold it
Everything behind the code
- Why this problem, and why now
- Which customer segment you chose to lose
- Legal constraint vs. someone’s preference
- What you already tried, and what happened
- Which reading of the ticket you actually meant
- The things you explicitly decided not to build
The right-hand column can’t be recovered from any codebase, at any model capability level, ever. It lives in discovery, strategy and decisions — and in most companies, it lives nowhere durable at all.