System Context

If agents are your employees, system context is the environment you set for them — what your business is, who it serves, and how it should sound. It's global, operator-managed background information that Circus makes available to your workflows at runtime, so you don't have to repeat it in every prompt.

What goes in it

Each context item is a named entry with a body of text — things like company name, brand guidelines, target audience, tone of voice, or compliance boundaries. You give it a name and the content; the app generates a read-only slug from the name (lowercase, letters and numbers), and that slug is fixed once created, even if you later rename the item.

Enabling and disabling

Every item has an enabled/disabled toggle, and this is the important part: only enabled items are handed to workflows, and only for runs that start after the change. Disabling a context item — or editing its body — never reaches back into a run that's already underway. Each execution takes a snapshot of the enabled context at the moment it starts. Disabled items appear greyed out in the list, and deleting an item is permanent.

How workflows receive it

When a workflow starts, Circus includes a system_context object in the data it sends — a simple set of key/value pairs, one per enabled item, keyed by slug. Ordering doesn't matter; what matters is that every enabled entry is passed along. Whether an agent actually uses a given piece of context is up to how its prompt is written — system context makes the information available; the prompt decides what to do with it.

Why it's powerful

Setting the environment once, centrally, is what lets every agent and every workflow speak with one consistent voice — without you copy-pasting the same brand or compliance text into dozens of prompts. Change the company's tone in one place, and every run from that point forward reflects it.