/ax-audit

Agent uses context the user can't see or edit

Agent injects preferences, past interactions, or learned patterns into its prompt, but the user can't see what the agent "knows" about them. Opaque memory feels invasive. Memory in Motion requires every piece of stored context to have a user-facing view and edit path.

What goes wrong

Agent says "Based on your preference for concise answers..." and the user thinks "What preference? I never said that." The system built a profile from past interactions and injected it into the system prompt with zero user visibility: no settings page, no memory panel, no way to correct it.

Detection

Surfaces: agent-chat, agent-config, agent-dashboard

Auditability: code-auditable

Static signals:

1. Find context injection points (prompt builders, context loaders, preference injectors).
2. Search for UI that exposes this context (settings pages, memory panels).
3. Flag injected context with no user-facing view or edit path.

Concrete commands:

rg '(systemPrompt|buildPrompt|contextLoader|injectContext|userPreferences|userMemory)' --type=ts -l src/
rg '(MemoryPanel|PreferencesView|WhatIKnow|MemorySettings)' --type=ts -l src/
rg '(savePreference|updateMemory|storePattern|learnFrom)' --type=ts -l src/

False-positive guards:

• Skip files with // ax-audit-ignore:context-memory-not-visible.
• Skip test and Storybook fixtures.
• Skip internal admin-only agent tools where the operator is the developer.

Fix

For every context item injected into the prompt, provide UI to view and edit it: a "Memory" or "What I know about you" panel with edit/delete per item.

Default tier and overrides

Defaults to: fix-this-sprint

Examples

Anti-pattern (fails):

async function getAgentContext(userId: string) {
  const prefs = await redis.get(`user:${userId}:prefs`);
  const history = await redis.get(`user:${userId}:patterns`);
  return { preferences: prefs, patterns: history }; // never shown to user
}

Applied (passes):

// Context store is shared: same data feeds the agent AND the settings UI
async function getAgentContext(userId: string) {
  return await getVisibleMemory(userId); // MemorySettings reads the same store
}

function MemorySettings() {
  const memory = useMemory();
  return memory.items.map((m) => (
    <li key={m.id}>{m.summary} <button onClick={() => memory.delete(m.id)}>Delete</button></li>
  ));
}

Suppression

{/* ax-audit-ignore:context-memory-not-visible, internal dev tool, operator is the developer */}
<AgentPromptBuilder />