Agents deserve a real context format

Every agent framework reinvents the same thing: how does a model find out what this project is, what it’s allowed to touch, and where it left off? Most answers are informal conventions that don’t travel between tools.

BRIEF.md is my attempt at that missing piece, and the hard part of writing it was deciding what to leave out. The spec covers discovery, scope, and handoff shape, then refuses to touch compression, storage, or retrieval, because a standard that tries to do everything travels nowhere. It sits alongside AGENTS.md and MCP rather than competing with them. The July 2025 context-engineering work (dual channels, value-per-token handoffs) is what made a portable format feel necessary instead of decorative.

Whether it catches on is beside the point of building it. Writing the spec forced me to be precise about something I’d been doing by feel across a dozen repositories. Constellation later treats the same handoff shape as graph-shaped project memory.