Avoiding the context swamp. Build context from value and intent

Summary

Once the hangover clears, most teams make the same mistake: they try to document everything. Definitions pile up, nobody can say which ones matter, and the catalog becomes a swamp that agents and people both avoid.

Malcolm has argued all year that governance is an incentives problem. The people paying for it want control, the people using it want outcomes, and nothing changes until someone measures what governance costs and what it returns. He applies the same discipline to AI: very few large companies can even track their AI spend, and “if you don’t manage your costs, your costs will be managed for you.”

Nicolas, a product manager by background, puts it plainly: if context isn’t built from value and intent, it becomes another context swamp. Together they flip the order. Start with the decision or use case you’re trying to improve, put a rough value on it (as Malcolm puts it, you don’t need precision, you need order of magnitude), then build only the context it needs. Agents are now customers of that context too, and they won’t be served any better than the people are today.

Key takeaways

• The one question that should open every context or data request.
• A lightweight way to rank context work by the value of the use case it serves.
• How to keep context current after go-live by linking it to owners and outcomes.