Core concepts#

ContextLattice sits between agent harnesses and durable context. Models still reason and harnesses still act; ContextLattice preserves the mission, selects relevant evidence, carries bounded state forward, and records what actually worked.

The five product pillars#

• Durable continuity preserves objectives, decisions, constraints, and verified checkpoints across sessions.
• Explainable retrieval returns evidence and scope, not an unexplained text blob.
• Portable context lets the same mission move between supported harnesses without transcript replay.
• Verified skill evolution records outcomes and corrections so reusable behavior can improve under evidence.
• Aggregate Signal remains a controlled preview gated by independent privacy and utility review.

Context is not a transcript#

Raw conversation history is large, noisy, and often stale. A useful context packet is a bounded reconstruction of what matters now:

• the current objective;
• relevant evidence and provenance;
• constraints and risks;
• unresolved questions;
• likely next actions;
• explicit uncertainty.

This shape gives the receiving agent something it can inspect rather than something it must blindly trust.

Projects, topics, and sessions#

A project is the durable top-level scope used by the normal CLI lifecycle. A topic path narrows memory inside that project. A session tracks the live objective and its retrieval, checkpoint, correction, and completion events.

Use stable project names. Create narrower topics when a repository, incident, release, or customer thread would otherwise collide with unrelated work.

Retrieval modes#

Start with the least expensive mode that can answer the task.

1. Fast favors the fast-now sources for narrow engineering loops.
2. Balanced mixes immediate results with measured continuation and is the normal broad-read posture.
3. Deep widens recall for audits, migrations, and root-cause work.

Slow sources may continue after the first bounded answer. Continuation tokens and events let clients receive that depth without making every interaction wait for the slowest dependency.

Liveness, readiness, and real retrieval#

These are separate claims:

• /health says the orchestrator can answer a liveness request.
• Authenticated status and doctor output describe dependency and configuration posture.
• A bounded write/search or context-pack proof demonstrates the actual retrieval path.

A healthy container is useful evidence, but it is not a substitute for a real readback when retrieval correctness matters.

Evidence and provenance#

High-value records carry enough context to be checked later: source identity, project, topic, file or artifact, timestamps, and the command or observation that produced the conclusion. Memory without provenance should be treated as a lead, not a confirmed fact.

Outcomes and corrections#

contextlattice finish reports whether the task succeeded, required repair, or failed. contextlattice correct labels retrieved context as useful, wrong, stale, or superseded. These signals close the loop without pretending that model confidence is ground truth.

Local-first storage posture#

The public local-lite core uses topic rollups and Qdrant. Full and operator stacks can add more sources behind the same agent-facing contract. Storage selection does not change the basic rule: preserve the durable record, keep retrieval scoped, and expose degraded sources rather than manufacturing certainty.

Next#

Use the CLI reference for the normal workflow, or move to Integrations when an application needs HTTP or MCP.