Why Every Agent Needs the Same Workspace
Multiple agents can have different roles while operating from the same governed model and evidence.
Agents do not need identical prompts. They need compatible views of the same workspace.
A coding agent, reviewer, release agent, and incident assistant have different tasks. Their context should be scoped differently. But project identities, contracts, policies, evidence state, and known unknowns should not change with the agent brand or runtime.
Shared substrate, scoped views
The coding view may emphasize editable scope and commands. The review view may emphasize impact and policy. The release view may emphasize gates and freshness. All views still refer to the same project and evidence identities.
What goes wrong without it
- one agent edits a directory another agent considers generated;
- a reviewer checks an obsolete command;
- a release agent trusts evidence from a different revision;
- tool-specific instruction files encode conflicting policies;
- handoffs lose the assumptions that shaped the previous action.
Agent-specific renderers remain useful. AGENTS.md, IDE rules, skills, and MCP
resources can express the same governed information in different forms. The
renderer is a consumer boundary, not a new source of truth.
This is the purpose of Agent Grounding: give agents a shared operating substrate while preserving their role-specific capabilities.
Evidence-backed Context
Context becomes operationally trustworthy when every important fact carries provenance, scope, freshness, and confidence.
From Repository to Workspace Model
How source containers become an evidence-backed representation of projects, relationships, policies, and operational state.