Show HN: Directed Contexts – repo-owned instruction modules for coding agents

A developer released Directed Contexts, an open-source pattern for creating repository-owned instruction modules that coding agents can load inline or spawn in isolation, enabling bounded codebase ownership and deterministic validation. The project includes a scanner, generator, and drift detection tool, extracted from a working prototype and hardened with mechanisms from sibling repositories.

Generate bounded codebase ownership contexts that agents can load inline or spawn in isolation. A Directed Context is a repository-owned instruction module with an explicit domain, owned paths, invariants, adjacent contexts, and verification contract. This repository ships the pattern specification, a generator skill that produces context sets for any repository, a deterministic validation tool, and two golden examples. The outputs are portable Markdown. They do not require Claude, Codex, Copilot, or any particular subagent implementation — a harness with native subagents can spawn one scoped by a context; a harness without them loads the same context inline. your-repo/ ├── AGENTS.md Context Router: universal rules + routing tables └── .subagents/ ├── README.md Context index ├── AGENTS-RUNTIME.md Directed context primary owner of paths ├── AGENTS-WORKER.md Directed context primary owner of paths ├── AGENTS-SECURITY.md Policy overlay cross-cutting, owns no paths └── route-cases.json Testable routing fixtures The codebase is the state. AGENTS.md is the map. .subagents/ .md are bounded ownership contexts. The runtime chooses whether to load or spawn. The pattern was extracted from a working prototype — leather https://github.com/TGPSKI/leather 's seventeen-guide .subagents/ routing table — and hardened with mechanisms from three sibling repositories: it sits beside directed-workflows https://github.com/TGPSKI/directed-workflows processes agents walk users through , borrows its coordinate-verification gate from abductive-triage https://github.com/TGPSKI/abductive-triage , and takes its detect-deterministically/ask-only-judgment split from security-context-spec https://github.com/TGPSKI/security-context-spec . The full ancestry, including what the prototype still teaches the abstraction, is in LINEAGE.md /TGPSKI/directed-contexts/blob/main/LINEAGE.md . Point your agent at a repository and invoke the skill SKILL.md . It will: - Run the deterministic scanner — contextctl scan — to inventory packages, entry points, existing instructions, CODEOWNERS, and commands. - Verify the repo's coordinate system root, monorepo boundaries, source vs. generated trees before modeling anything. - Propose ownership boundaries from weighted evidence, asking only about genuinely ambiguous ones. - Generate the contexts, index, router, and route-case fixtures. - Validate everything mechanically. what the skill runs under the hood go run scripts/contextctl.go scan --repo /path/to/your/repo go run scripts/contextctl.go check --repo /path/to/your/repo go run scripts/contextctl.go routes --repo /path/to/your/repo --cases .subagents/route-cases.json For a repo that already has a router and contexts, the skill routes to audit mode: go run scripts/contextctl.go check --repo /path/to/your/repo go run scripts/contextctl.go drift --repo /path/to/your/repo drift reports unowned packages, deleted owned paths, overlapping claims, stale review dates, missing verification commands, and split/merge candidates. | Path | Contents | |---|---| | LINEAGE.md /TGPSKI/directed-contexts/blob/main/LINEAGE.md SKILL.md /TGPSKI/directed-contexts/blob/main/SKILL.md references/ /TGPSKI/directed-contexts/blob/main/references scripts/contextctl.go /TGPSKI/directed-contexts/blob/main/scripts/contextctl.go scan , check , routes , drift assets/templates/ /TGPSKI/directed-contexts/blob/main/assets/templates examples/abductive-triage/ /TGPSKI/directed-contexts/blob/main/examples/abductive-triage examples/security-context-spec/ /TGPSKI/directed-contexts/blob/main/examples/security-context-spec | Term | Meaning | |---|---| Context Router | Root AGENTS.md ; maps work signals and paths to contexts | Directed Context | One .subagents/AGENTS-{DOMAIN}.md module | Context Set | The router plus every directed context | Primary context | The sole owner of a package/path | Policy overlay | Cross-cutting security, performance, operations, or quality context | Inline load | Read the context into the current session | Isolated spawn | Start a subagent scoped by that context | Route case | A representative task with an expected context selection | Context drift | Codebase structure or behavior no longer matching the router/guides | Full definitions and invariants live in PATTERN.md /TGPSKI/directed-contexts/blob/main/PATTERN.md . The Markdown is canonical. There is no hidden manifest; contextctl parses and validates the routing tables and context files directly. Contexts are coordination, not authorization. A spawned subagent inherits the caller's permissions; ownership scopes are never security enforcement. Deterministic where possible, human where necessary. The scanner answers every question that lives on disk; users decide only contested boundaries. Read-only by default. The scanner never writes, never executes repository content, never follows symlinks out of the repo, and generation shows the proposed file set before writing. Requires Go 1.22+. make test unit tests fixtures + golden examples make check lint + format check + tests + golden validation make check-examples validate both golden context sets make scan REPO=... run the scanner against any repo