Agent Startup and Context Ingestion

How an agent becomes useful after launch: AGENTS.md overlays, role files, skills, rig specs, workflow specs, startup checklists, refocus messages, and the current rig context retrieval and profile surface.

It is the current concrete startup path inside the broader context-engineering-and-retrieval primitive. Startup gets a seat into the right initial shape; context engineering is the larger question of how a seat gets the right context for the work it is doing right now.

Most coordination failures are not tool failures; they are context failures. Agents need to know their role, operating mode, coordination convention, boundaries, and current product intent. If startup context is scattered or stale, agents execute the wrong thing very efficiently.

Use this when

• Authoring a new agent's startup files (role / culture / startup-context)
• Refreshing a seat that's been running on stale guidance
• Auditing whether agents got the current operating mode (not just what's in old files)
• Designing the orchestrator → next-agent context-transmission shape
• Building a startup map for OpenRig-building rigs

Don't use this when

• The agent is being created via Agent Starter, the starter's manifest carries startup context
• The work is artifact-backed mental-model rebuild from a packet, that's session-compaction-and-restore
• The intent is to ship reusable startup content as a skill

Failure modes (4)