Portable Context: The Open Contract for Agents

What this chapter covers

Your context is your intellectual property. If it lives locked inside one vendor's runtime, you have handed your most durable asset to a platform you do not control. This chapter makes the case for portable context — an open contract that moves across agents, models, and clouds — and shows what that contract needs to contain.

Key takeaways

• Why context lock-in is more dangerous than model lock-in
• What an open context contract must specify to stay portable
• How to keep semantics, policy, and memory outside vendor-specific formats
• Evaluating platforms on export fidelity, not just feature lists
• Migration patterns that let you switch runtimes without relearning the business