Operate It

A context layer starts aging the moment it works. Fields are renamed, picklist values appear, ownership changes, and rules survive long after the process they describe.

Give every rule a lifecycle

Draft, review, activate, observe, revise, retire. Version changes and keep an owner. Time-bound rules get an expiry date; durable rules get a review date. “Still active” and “recently verified” are different claims.

Diff the live schema against rule references

A renamed CRM field does not update its context entry. Run a scheduled schema diff and queue vanished fields, type changes, new values, and uncovered fields for review. A rule pointing at a missing field should fail loudly.

Log enough to reconstruct one bad answer

Keep the guidance version, loaded rule IDs, planned and executed fields, tool calls, permission scope, answer or refusal, latency, and cache status. That turns “the agent was weird Tuesday” into a specific rule or retrieval failure.

Watch behavior, not activity

Useful measures include regression pass rate, stale-rule rate, correction rate, refusal rate, boundary rejection rate, cache hit rate, and cost per question. A boundary rejection rate of zero often means the boundary is not wired up.

Diagnose a schema-drift trace in the GTM Lab and route it to the correct owner.

Reference

• Operating a CRM context layer →
• Failure-mode index →