Context as Code

For thirty years we have versioned our source. We learned, painfully, that code without history is a liability, that a shared definition beats a dozen private copies, and that the thing everyone depends on deserves an owner.

We never did the same for what the code means.

The constraints, the trade-offs, and the hard-won reasons a system is shaped the way it is often live in your head, an archived thread, or the memory of the engineer who was there. This knowledge is valuable and hard to preserve.

Intelligence got cheap, so this got urgent

Agents can touch more of your system now. But they do not know your domain. The generic version of your code is one prompt away, and it looks fine, right up until it quietly erodes the thing that made the work yours.

You cannot fix that with a smarter model. The knowledge it needs is missing from the context where it acts.

The fix is not more documentation. It is treating context the way we already treat code: defined once, versioned, owned, and composed.

What a context module is

A context module is a named, versioned specification of how one part of your system should work and why, written so an agent can act on that standard.

catalog (context module)

  Every product has a stable SKU that never changes.
  Out-of-stock items stay listed, marked unavailable.
  Listings reflect live inventory, never a cached count.

  depends on: database, inventory

The interesting part is the last line. A module declares what it depends on, and those dependencies connect modules into a Semantic Directed Acyclic Graph, a SemDAG. Flashing a module assembles its declared dependency closure.

Flash, don't search

Before work on checkout, an agent can flash the module. The result is the whole subgraph, compiled in topological order into a single payload: foundations first, your module last. The agent receives every declared dependency before it reaches checkout.

Cortex supplies the exact dependency closure in the order a person would teach it.

The payoff

Capture the standard once, and each flash carries it into the agent's context. Work can compound when each change starts from that standard and the result is verified.

That is the whole idea. Context as code.