Context Development Lifecycle
Context quality requires a continuous loop, not one-time authoring.
- Generate
Make implicit knowledge explicit. Author context in dense, hierarchical units with clear ownership.
- Evaluate
Use Context Evaluation to measure the impact of context changes before broad promotion.
- Distribute
Ship context through an explicit distribution channel. Common patterns include:
- MCP or knowledge-base server
- Supports indexing and search patterns.
- Can evolve continuously, which may require snapshots.
- Governance can be enforced through access controls.
- Markdown in a repository
- Simplest model.
- Shared context can drift when duplicated across files.
- Git gives repository versioning, but knowledge units are not always explicitly versioned.
- Packages distributed as modules
- Supports explicit versioning.
- Access control can be managed via internal package systems.
- Evals can ship with the context package.
- Skills are one example.
- Observe
Learn from real usage and feed observations back into the next generate/evaluate cycle.