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Hypercontext Protocol

The social contract for connecting your sovereign personal context to services and agents you don't own.

You are building up context every day. What you like, what you're working on, who matters to you, what you're aiming at. Today that context is scattered across apps that own it, or trapped in your head where no service can use it.

The future of life online looks different: you hold your own context, sovereignly, and you connect a small slice of it to any application to make that application instantly useful. No re-typing your preferences into a tenth onboarding form. No handing your whole life to a company because you wanted one trip planned.

We call the whole body of that personal context your hypercontext: everything about you that you have captured and curated, held where you host it, behind walls you built on purpose. Your context castle is that architecture: deliberately designed rooms for each part of your life, with one gate. The Hypercontext Protocol is the contract that governs what happens when any piece of it leaves home.

Diagram: a person's context castle drawn as a walled keep with category rooms inside (preferences, relationships, projects, goals, health, expertise, personality assessments) and a locked inner keep for inner life that never leaves. A gatekeeper, your own curator agent, stands at the single gate, and thin blue beams carry labeled slivers to three services: a travel agent receives travel style and dates only, a meal planner receives allergies only, a client finder receives an expertise profile only.

The core bargain​

You have to share to get relevance from services. But don't overshare.

Imagine an agent that knows everything about Antigua. Connect the travel-relevant sliver of your hypercontext and it produces a customized trip plan in seconds. It gets your travel style, your dates, your budget posture. It does not get your journal entries, your relationships, or your trauma. It never needed them, and excellent service never requires more than it needs.

Or a new fashion line just dropped. Connect your fashion DNA, the preferences and silhouettes that actually work on you, and you instantly get recommendations of what to buy based on who you are. No quiz, no browsing history, no month of the algorithm guessing.

You should never have to repeat yourself unnecessarily in life. That is what connecting context buys you, and the protocol is what keeps the price honest: you should only share as much as excellence of service requires.

Connect your context, not your identity​

Today you "sign in with Google" and the service learns almost nothing useful about you. Then it spends weeks watching you, or asks you to fill out forms, to learn what you could have simply told it.

Under the protocol, the front door changes. Instead of signing in with an identity provider, you connect your context: a scoped, curated sliver of your hypercontext that makes the service excellent from the first minute. A new app is useful immediately because it starts already knowing exactly what it needs, and nothing else.

Any agent or service that does not work this way will feel the same as a fresh chat account feels today: generic, because it isn't personalized. Where the world is going is people managing their own context and quickly getting hyper-relevant value from agents they employ but do not own.

Your curator, not their crawler​

The sharing decision does not belong to the service. It belongs to an agent that works for you. Your own curator agent reads the request, decides which files are genuinely needed for the job, and passes only those across the boundary. Even if a connection leaks, what leaks is a sliver with a limited attack window, some information about a flight, never the castle.

What this site is​

This is an evolving reference, authored by Gary Sheng. It holds the protocol itself, the contrast with adjacent standards like MCP, and a growing taxonomy of what belongs in a person's hypercontext and why.

  • The Protocol: the eight tenets any implementation must honor.
  • Hypercontext vs. MCP: the bridge and the contract are different layers.
  • Your Hypercontext: what you might store, category by category, and what each category should never give away.

The implementation details can differ across implementations. What cannot differ is the contract. When something claims to implement the Hypercontext Protocol, it should be very clear what is happening: minimal disclosure in, purpose-bound use inside, real deletion on the way out.

Changelog​

  • Updated 2026-08-15 (Context) Preferences & Taste: What you like: the highest-utility, lowest-stakes room in the castle, and the one that makes the everyday case for connecting your context.
  • Removed 2026-08-15 (Concept) Sample Concept: A one-line definition of the sample concept. Quotable, plain, no rhetorical flourishes.
  • New 2026-08-15 (Context) Goals: What you're aiming at, near and far: goal context as the room that lets services optimize for where you're going instead of where you've been.
  • New 2026-08-15 (Context) Health & Body: Conditions, allergies, fitness, sleep: the highest-stakes room in the castle, and the one that makes minimal disclosure vivid.
  • New 2026-08-15 (Context) Inner Life: Journal, faith, therapy: the keep at the center of the castle. Some context exists only for you and your own agents, and its existence defines the boundary for everything else.
  • New 2026-08-15 (Context) Personality Assessments: How you're wired, on paper: assessment results as stored context that lets any service adapt to you without watching you for six months.
  • New 2026-08-15 (Context) Preferences & Taste: What you like: the highest-utility, lowest-stakes room in the castle, and the one that makes the everyday case for connecting your context.
  • New 2026-08-15 (Context) Projects: What you're building and where it lives: project context as the room that makes any hired agent productive on contact instead of after a week of onboarding.

For the full month-by-month log, see the Changelog.