Context Doorman
Not tonight. Your architecture decision expired.
The Context Doorman decides which information gets into the agent's active context. Picture an exclusive club with a velvet rope. An old wiki page is waving a screenshot of its former owner. A Slack thread says it knows the CTO. A model-written summary insists it is already on the list because it read the door policy.
Symptom
Agents confidently cite stale documents, deprecated runbooks, and memories of a company that no longer exists. The Doorman is the only thing between the velvet rope and the rot.
Why It Matters
Context is authority. Whatever crosses the rope gets quoted, retrieved, and reused by every agent downstream. A weak Doorman lets one outdated page become an organization-wide fact.
What the Chapter Gives You
How to gate context by freshness and provenance, why retrieval is an access-control problem, and the expiry policy that keeps the club list from becoming a museum.
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