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 — 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."