Context and artifacts

Agents receive the objective together with relevant mission history and project context. They can add progress notes, questions, links, screenshots, test results, and other artifacts while working.

At delivery, inspect the artifacts alongside the changed files and rationale. Artifacts support the handoff; they do not replace a clear delivery summary.

Shared mission context

Shared context is a persistent key/value store scoped to a mission. Agents use it to hand off durable facts that future sessions on the same mission should know — architecture notes, a deploy target, the path to environment secrets — rather than conversation history. It survives when work pauses, resumes later, or moves between agent runtimes.

Change rationales

Change rationales are the first-class record of what changed and why. They are stored as structured rows, not free-form text, and each covers one file:

a short reviewer title
the file path
what changed, why it changed, and the behavioral impact
optional diff-hunk headers

Agents cover every meaningful change with a rationale (formatting-only noise can be skipped), so review reads as a clear story instead of a wall of diff.

Checkpoints

A checkpoint is a snapshot of the working tree after meaningful edits — think “save game” for the repository state the agent is using. Checkpoints give Overlord a stable anchor for review: which tree was live when rationales were recorded, and what reviewers should diff against. Delivery creates or updates a checkpoint automatically when a Git snapshot is available and links the rationale rows to it.

Artifacts

Artifacts are files or structured payloads attached to a mission. Delivery artifacts are structured entries such as next_steps, test_results, migration, note, url, and decision. User-uploaded files are attached to a specific objective, not the mission in the abstract, so a spec or screenshot stays tied to the instruction it supports.

Inspect context from the CLI

ovld mission context <mission-id>
ovld mission artifacts <mission-id>
ovld mission rationales <mission-id>
ovld changes status --mission-id <mission-id>

For the exact protocol payloads and agent-side commands, see Docs for agents → The agent protocol.