/ax-audit

System prompt missing resource injection

System prompt says "You are a helpful assistant" with zero dynamic context. Agent asks "What files do you have?" instead of using them. Violates Improvement Over Time: agents should accumulate context, not start blind.

What goes wrong

User opens a project management agent. System prompt has role instructions but nothing about 3 active projects or 12 unread notifications. First message: "What would you like to work on today?"

Detection

Surfaces: agent-config

Static signals:

1. Find system prompt assembly: string templates, prompt builders, message arrays.
2. Check whether the prompt injects: (a) available resources, (b) capabilities, (c) recent activity.
3. Flag prompts missing any of the three.

Concrete commands:

rg 'role:\s*["\x27]system["\x27]' --type=ts -A 10 src/ | rg -v '\$\{|concat|join|append'
rg '(availableResources|recentActivity|capabilities|context\.md)' --type=ts src/

Judgment signals:

• Missing any of the three sections is the usual fail (too little).
• A prompt that injects every tool and every procedure on every run also fails: the run should carry what this task needs, not the whole product. A small agent with a short resident toolset is not this.

False-positive guards:

• Skip files with // ax-audit-ignore:context-starvation.
• Skip test files and fixtures.
• Skip prompts that delegate context loading to a separate init step.
• Just-in-time retrieval counts. A prompt that names what exists and hands the agent a read_context or list_* tool to fetch the rest passes the resources section; the fail is data that is neither present nor discoverable.

Fix

// before
const messages = [{ role: "system", content: "You are a helpful assistant." }, ...userMessages];

// after: inject Available Data, What You Can Do, Recent Context
const ctx = await loadProjectContext(session.userId);
const messages = [
  { role: "system", content: `You are an assistant.\n\n## Available Data\n${ctx.resources}\n\n## Capabilities\n${ctx.capabilities}\n\n## Recent Context\n${ctx.recent}` },
  ...userMessages,
];

Default tier and overrides

Defaults to: fix-this-sprint

Examples

Anti-pattern (fails):

const messages = [{ role: "system", content: "You are a helpful assistant." }];

Applied (passes):

const ctx = await loadProjectContext(userId);
const messages = [{ role: "system", content: `You assist with code.\n\n${ctx.format()}` }];

Suppression

// ax-audit-ignore:context-starvation, bootstrapping prompt, context injected by middleware
const basePrompt = "You are a helpful assistant.";