Jul 20, 2025
Context Is All You Need
AI systems that understand you deeply enough to anticipate needs and take autonomous action will fundamentally reshape how we interact with technology. But who controls that understanding?
We just published "Context is All You Need" - a deep dive into why context, not algorithms or compute, will determine which AI platforms win.
The insight: AI systems that understand you deeply enough to anticipate needs and take autonomous action will fundamentally reshape how we interact with technology. But who controls that understanding?
The paper explored everything from personal context servers to the business incentives keeping your context locked away in memory. My memory should be separate from the agents and models that require access to them. The most compelling experiments: individuals running personal MCP servers that give them control over what context gets shared with which AI systems - early glimpses of user-controlled context portability.
Key tensions we uncovered:
- Specialized vs. general-purpose context aggregation
- User sovereignty vs. platform convenience
- Premonition capabilities vs. privacy boundaries
- Cross-domain insights vs. compartmentalized experiences
This research is directly informed by what we're building at koodos labs - giving individuals agency over their personal context while enabling the cross-platform insights that make AI truly useful. This is built on years of thinking and building for lots and lots of people to aggregate their context in one place on Shelf. The next few years will determine whether we get AI that enhances human agency or diminishes it. Context truly is all we need - the question is who gets to wield it.
