One concept. Completely bounded.
A Context Capsule bounds the context around a single concept. What it is. What it isn't. What will trip you up. One concept, one file, complete.
The concept can be anything — a product, a team, a metric, a customer segment, a company, a process. If something needs context to work with it, it's a candidate for a capsule.
Context leaks. Constantly.
Through turnover, reorgs, growth, and simple forgetfulness. The knowledge that makes a business actually work lives in the heads of a handful of people. When they leave, it leaves with them. When they're busy, everyone guesses.
Most organisations don't have a context problem. They have an assembly problem. The knowledge exists — it's scattered across wikis, tickets, Slack threads, and people's heads. Nobody has ever put it in one place, drawn the boundaries, and said: this is what this thing is, this is what it isn't, and this is what will go wrong.
A capsule is that assembly. The bounded, complete context for one concept — portable, persistent, and consumable by anyone.
Same primitive. Different worlds.
The structure doesn't change. The concept does. That's the point.
Engineering
An AI agent reads PAYMENT_SERVICE_CONTEXT.md and gets bounded context over a service boundary. It reasons about the API without hallucinating endpoints that don't exist.
Marketing
A marketing lead hands COMPANY_CONTEXT.md to a copywriter — human or AI. Positioning, what the company explicitly isn't, messaging landmines. The first draft lands instead of needing three rounds of correction.
Data
A data team defines what revenue means in their business — and what it doesn't — in REVENUE_CONTEXT.md. The analyst pulling board numbers doesn't mix in test transactions because the gotcha is right there.
People
A new hire reads ONBOARDING_CONTEXT.md and gets up to speed without a 45-minute briefing from the one person who knows.
What capsules are not.
Not documentation.
Documentation describes. A capsule briefs. The difference is a city map versus a local showing you around. One gives you information. The other gives you the judgment layer on top.
Not a wiki.
A wiki tells you everything about a topic. A capsule tells you the minimum you need to not screw up.
Not a schema.
A schema describes shape. A capsule describes meaning, bounds, and judgment.
Not a Claude Skill or a Cursor Rule.
Those are useful — but they're compiled outputs. You generate a Skill from a capsule. And after working with a Skill for a while, you capture what you've learned back into the capsule. The capsule is the source of truth. The outputs are optimised for specific tools.
A capsule is the source of truth.
Everything flows from it — and back into it.
From one capsule you can generate a Claude Skill, a Cursor Rule, an onboarding brief, a stakeholder summary, an API reference. The capsule is the institutional knowledge. Each of those is one output, optimised for one tool or one audience.
And after working in a domain — building, debugging, shipping — you capture what you've learned back into the capsule. The context is freshest at the point of work. A capsule isn't a document you write once. It's the thing that gets sharper every time someone works with the concept it describes.
If you're maintaining the same context in five different places, you don't have five sources of truth. You have zero. One capsule. Many outputs. Continuous capture.
Any concept. Same structure.
You saw a customer capsule. Here's a company capsule. Different concept, same primitive.
COMPANY_CONTEXT.md Active Paysail is a B2B cross-border payments platform. We reduce the cost and settlement time of international supplier payments for mid-market importers.
We are not a consumer remittance service. We do not hold funds or act as a bank. Partners who describe us as a 'neobank' create compliance risk and confuse prospects.
The 2024 pitch deck positions us as 'payments infrastructure' but the product has shifted to a managed service. The API docs and two landing pages still use the old framing. Enterprise prospects expect self-serve integration and get confused in the demo.