---
title: What your agent receives
description: The shape of a context pack — which rules are sent, in what order, what is deliberately left out, and what the pack says about its own gaps.
---

<span class="vy-eyebrow">AI tools</span>

# What your agent receives

When a tool asks Vythos for context, it doesn't get your Playbook. It gets a
**pack**: the rules that bear on this task, for this client, within the access
of the person whose connection it is — ordered, with the values stated
separately, and honest about what it left out.

You don't have to read this page to use Vythos. It's here because the answer to
"what did my AI tool actually know?" should be inspectable.

## What's in a pack

**Who your agency is.** The description from Settings — what you do, who
for — labelled as context, not a rule, so a tool knows whose work it's doing
without quoting your self-description as policy.

**Your clients.** The names of the clients you've added, active and dormant,
with exact counts — the names `client` accepts, and the answer to "how many
clients do we have?", which no document states. For someone restricted to
particular clients, only theirs, and the tool is told not to state a total.

**The rules.** Each one with its identifier, category, title, whether it
applies to every client or one, its version number, its text, its rank, and its
values.

**The values, resolved.** Where several rules state the same kind of value, the
one that governs is resolved and handed over, labelled with what it is: not
`1.5` but *1.5× the standard day rate*, not `45` but *45 days*. Where two rules
at the same scope disagree, no value is resolved — the pack reports the
disagreement rather than picking.

**Passages from memory** that match the task.

**The order**, stated explicitly, so a tool doesn't have to infer it: client
rules first, then house rules by category.

**What must be cited.**

**A pack identifier**, used to check a draft later and to report what was
followed.

## What it says about its own gaps

This is the part that matters most, and the part most systems skip.

| Signal | What it tells the tool |
|---|---|
| **No rules found** | "No governed context available. Acknowledge the gap before proceeding" — so the tool says it's improvising rather than sounding authoritative |
| **No client-specific rules** | "Proceed with agency defaults. No client-specific rules found" |
| **A client exception exists but wasn't asked for** | Which client and which category has its own rule — **never what it says**. Enough for the tool to ask "who is this for?" instead of quoting your defaults as universal |
| **Rules omitted for size** | How many were left out, and to ask for a bigger budget or fewer categories before relying on the pack |
| **Rules sent as values only** | When a pack is tight, a rule can arrive as its values without its full wording. It still binds, and the tool is told to search for the text if it needs it |
| **Figures present** | "State each figure in the unit its key names, and do not calculate new figures from them" |

That last one matters more than it looks. A rule stating *1.5× the standard
day rate* is easy to quote correctly and then multiply into an hourly figure
that appears in no version of anything — stated with exactly the same
confidence as the figure it came from. A derived number is the easiest way for
a governance layer to make things worse, so tools are told to hand over the
figures and the rule, and leave the arithmetic to a person.

## What is never in a pack

- **Rules in categories the connection's owner can't see.** They aren't
  filtered on the way out; they were never gathered.
- **Other clients' rules** when a client is named.
- **Another person's memory.**
- **Another client's rules**, or anything they say. The client list carries
  names, never rules.
- **For someone restricted to particular clients: the other clients at all.**
  Not their rules, not their names, not that an exception exists — nothing
  that reveals them.

## Size

A pack has a token budget — about 12,000 by default — and a tool can ask for
more or narrow the categories. Rules are packed in precedence order, so if
anything has to be left out it's the least authoritative, and the pack says
what went.

## Seeing it for yourself

Ask your connected tool to fetch context for a task and show you what came
back. Every field above will be there, including the gap signals, and it's the
quickest way to understand what your tools are actually working from.

Next: [The four tools](/ai-tools/tools).