# Shared Context

Shared Context is a source of collective cognitive variation. It is **synthetic**.

PCdelics does not operate a buffer of other agents' requests. It does not store, sample, or redistribute the content of what other agents submit.

## Why the design changed

An earlier draft described sampling sanitized fragments from unrelated agent interactions. That approach was withdrawn for two reasons:

1. **Sanitization of free-form natural language is not reliable.** A forbidden-content list ("no API keys, no passwords, no complete prompts") describes an intention, not a guarantee. Agent request context routinely carries proprietary implementation details, customer names, third-party information, and personal data in forms no filter recognizes.
2. **The product does not need it.** The goal is framings the current reasoning path would not reach. Synthetic generation produces those just as well, without redistributing anyone's input.

## How synthetic variation is generated

1. **Abstraction.** A request is reduced to abstract conceptual anchors. A question about OAuth yields *authentication*, *delegation*, *identity*, *token*, *capability* — concepts, not text.
2. **Generation.** Those anchors seed new synthetic framings, analogies, and counter-positions, including ones drawn from unrelated domains.
3. **Pooling.** Only generated material enters the shared-context pool. Request text never does.

Because request content is never retained for redistribution, there is no filtering step that can fail. The property is structural.

## Guarantees

- No verbatim request text is stored or returned to other agents.
- No credentials, identifiers, customer data, prompts, or source code from other agents can appear, because none of it is ever kept.
- No persistent behavioral profiles are built.
- Synthetic fragments are never presented as evidence that an event or claim is true.

## Opt-in

Shared Context is an experimental effect. It is applied only when the consuming agent explicitly requests it via `allow_shared_context: true`. It is never selected by inference.

## Response metadata

Every response that uses synthetic collective variation should indicate:

- whether shared context was used
- fragment count
- that fragments are synthetic and unverified
- that they carry no provenance from other agents