openhuman/gitbooks/features/super-context.md

description, icon

description	icon
Deterministic, harness-driven context preparation on the first turn of every new conversation - so the agent never starts cold.	sparkles

SuperContext

A fresh chat shouldn't start cold. SuperContext makes the agent gather relevant background before it reads your first message. It happens automatically, on every new thread, without you asking and without waiting on a tool call.

Most agents start a conversation blank and only fetch context if the model decides to call a "look things up" tool. That adds a round-trip, costs tokens, and depends on the model choosing well. SuperContext flips it: the harness itself prepares context up front, deterministically, so the very first reply already knows the relevant memories, files, and connected data.

---

How it works

On the first turn of a new thread, if SuperContext is enabled, the harness:

1. Spawns a read-only context_scout sub-agent.
2. The scout sweeps your available data (the Memory Tree, workspace files, and connected integrations) and assembles a bounded context bundle.
3. The bundle is validated, then prepended to your message under a Prepared context (super context) header before the orchestrator model ever sees the turn.
4. The model answers your message already grounded in that context.

New thread, first message
        │
        ▼
┌──────────────────────────────┐
│  Harness gate (deterministic) │
│  super_context_enabled?       │
└───────────────┬──────────────┘
                │ yes
                ▼
        context_scout (read-only)
        sweeps memory + files + data
                │
                ▼
        [context_bundle] … [/context_bundle]
                │  validated & extracted
                ▼
   Prepended to your message → orchestrator

Because the scout is read-only, it can never take an action on a fresh thread. It only reads and summarizes. And because it runs in the harness rather than as an optional tool, the redundant agent_prepare_context tool is suppressed for that turn, so the agent doesn't do the work twice.

The scout runs on the burst tier (hint = "burst" → burst-v1 on the managed backend), a cheap, high-throughput, non-reasoning model. The sweep is a latency-tolerant pre-flight pass, so raw throughput on a fast model is a better fit than the pricier agentic/reasoning tiers. See Automatic Model Routing.

---

Safety and robustness

The scout returns its findings wrapped in [context_bundle] … [/context_bundle] tags. Only the bracketed envelope is ever injected. Any surrounding prose the model emits ("sure, here's what I found…") is stripped out. If the bundle is missing, malformed (unterminated, reversed, or duplicated tags), or empty, the turn proceeds gracefully without augmentation rather than injecting garbage. A cold start is always preferable to a broken one.

---

Turning it on or off

SuperContext is on by default.

• From the composer. A Super Context toggle appears below the chat input on a fresh thread. The flag is read when a thread is constructed, so toggling it affects newly started threads, not the one you're already in.
• Config. context.super_context_enabled (boolean, default true).
• Environment. OPENHUMAN_SUPER_CONTEXT (or OPENHUMAN_CONTEXT_SUPER_CONTEXT_ENABLED).
• RPC. get_super_context_enabled() reads the flag; set_super_context_enabled(value) sets and persists it.

---

See also

• Memory Tree: the primary source the scout reads from.
• Auto-fetch from Integrations: keeps that source fresh between conversations.
• Subconscious Loop: the other side of "keeps thinking when you've stopped typing."