/ax-audit

Agent ignores available context it should use

The system has the user's project history, preferences, recent activity, and team context, but the agent's prompt includes none of it. The agent asks questions it should already know the answer to, wasting time and making it feel stupid.

What goes wrong

User opens a project page and asks "help me write a status update." Agent responds: "What project are you working on?" The project name, recent commits, and open tickets are all in app state, but the prompt ignores them. Every needless question erodes confidence.

Detection

Surfaces: agent-tool-execution

Auditability: hybrid

Static signals:

1. Catalog available context sources (user profile, project state, recent activity, team info).
2. Find agent prompt/context assembly functions.
3. Check whether available sources are referenced in context injection.
4. Flag significant context sources never passed to the agent.

Concrete commands:

rg '(useUser|useProject|useTeam|useActivity|currentProject|activeWorkspace)' --type=ts -l src/
rg '(buildPrompt|systemPrompt|assembleContext|getAgentContext)' --type=ts -l src/
rg -A 15 '(buildPrompt|assembleContext|getAgentContext)' --type=ts src/

Judgment signals:

• Would a human assistant in this position already know the answer?
• Is the missing context high-signal (project name, recent activity) or low-signal?

False-positive guards:

• Skip files with // ax-audit-ignore:context-under-contextual.
• Skip test/Storybook fixtures and generic agent surfaces with no page-specific context.

Fix

Inject relevant context at session start using the context.md pattern: "What I Know About This User," "What Exists," "Recent Activity." Update dynamically during the session.

Default tier and overrides

Defaults to: backlog

Examples

Anti-pattern (fails):

// User is on /projects/acme-redesign but agent gets no project context
export function ProjectAgent() {
  const { sendMessage } = useAgent({ system: "You are a helpful assistant." });
  return <AgentChat onSend={sendMessage} />;
}

Applied (passes):

export function ProjectAgent() {
  const project = useProject();
  const activity = useRecentActivity(project.id);
  const { sendMessage } = useAgent({
    system: `Assistant for ${project.name}. Recent: ${activity.map((a) => a.summary).join("; ")}`,
  });
  return <AgentChat onSend={sendMessage} />;
}

Suppression

{/* ax-audit-ignore:context-under-contextual, generic help chat, no page context needed */}
<HelpAgent />