Context Autopilot

Context Autopilot

Automated context collection for coding agents. Mines your real agent sessions — every instruction you repeated, every correction you made, every tool call you rejected — and distills them into CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md rules you approve.

Part of The Context Layer.

Run in your terminal (it's a plain CLI — don't paste this into a chat):

$ npx context-autopilot scan
Scanned 3 session(s) for ~/projects/my-appFound 26 signal(s):
  [CORRECTION] ×2 across 2 session(s)  (score 9)      "There are still so many buttons that dont work, like the publish…"  [REPEATED] ×4 across 3 session(s)  (score 10)      "Do not reference the legacy directory. Only work within…"
$ npx context-autopilot distill
[1/8] Perform click-and-type tests before reporting UI work complete  (confidence: high)    + Before declaring any screen done, click every button and verify it works.    evidence:      · 2026-06-27 — "There are still so many buttons that dont work…"
$ npx context-autopilot apply

Why

Every session starts blank, so you re-teach your agent the same conventions — and when you forget, it repeats the same mistakes. Hand-writing context files works but nobody keeps them current. And naive auto-generation is worse: research on LLM-generated context files found they reduce task success and raise cost, because repo scans produce generic filler.

Context Autopilot takes a third path: evidence. Your session history is a literal record of what the agent got wrong and what you said to fix it. Autopilot mines that record and only proposes rules your own words support — each one shipped with the quotes that justify it.

How it works

1. Observe — ctxlayer scan parses your local Claude Code transcripts (~/.claude/projects) and Cursor sessions and extracts three signal types: instructions repeated across sessions, corrections after the agent went wrong, and rejected tool calls. Runs 100% locally.
2. Distill — ctxlayer distill sends the signals (not your history) through Claude — via your existing claude CLI, no API key needed — and gets back imperative, project-specific rules with evidence and confidence ratings.
3. Approve — ctxlayer apply walks you through each proposal. Accepted rules land in a managed block:

<!-- ctxlayer:begin -->## Learned conventions (Context Autopilot)
- **Staff login cannot access admin view** — When authenticated as staff, the admin role toggle must be hidden or disabled.<!-- ctxlayer:end -->

Hand-written content is never touched; re-runs update the block idempotently. Rules are written to both CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, so Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, and every AGENTS.md-aware agent benefits.

Install

npm install -g context-autopilot   # or use npx, no install

Commands

Global mode

ctxlayer distill --global

Project context files hold repo conventions — but some feedback is about you: "explain things in plain English", "don't build while I'm brainstorming", "run independent work in parallel". Global mode mines all your projects across all your tools for exactly that, and maintains a managed block in your personal ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, so every future session in every project starts already knowing how you like to work. Rules that mention a specific project are excluded by design — those belong in the project's own context file.

Promote saved memory to global

ctxlayer promote

Where global mode mines your session transcripts, promote mines the memory your agents have already written down: each project's auto-memory files (~/.claude/projects/<name>/memory/) and each repo's CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md. Rules about how you work — or rules duplicated in two or more projects — are proposed for your global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, generalized and with the source files as evidence. Additive only: project files are read, never edited. Anything already covered globally is filtered before the model is even called.

Options: --project <path>, --global, --source claude-code|cursor|all, --model <model>, --min-score <n>, --yes, --json.

Cursor session mining reads Cursor's local SQLite storage via Node's built-in node:sqlite (Node 22+; on older Node the Cursor source is skipped gracefully).

Claude Code plugin

/plugin marketplace add chiragbachani/context-autopilot/plugin install context-autopilot@the-context-layer

Then ask Claude to "update project context from my session history" — or don't ask at all: the plugin ships a SessionStart hook that runs ctxlayer check (fast, no model call) when a session begins. If enough new signals have accumulated since the last distillation, Claude gets a nudge to offer distillation at a natural pause. No new signals → complete silence.

MCP server

{  "mcpServers": {    "context-autopilot": {      "command": "npx",      "args": ["-y", "-p", "context-autopilot", "ctxlayer-mcp"]    }  }}

Exposes list_observable_projects, scan_context_signals, distill_context_proposals, distill_global_context, promote_to_global, apply_context_proposals, and find_stale_context.

The approval loop closes entirely inside chat: distill tools return each proposal with its evidence and instruct the agent to ask you which to accept; apply_context_proposals then writes exactly the titles you approved, remembers the ones you rejected (never re-proposed), and leaves the rest pending. No tool ever touches a context file without your explicit decision.

FAQ

How is this different from Claude Code's /insights? /insights is the same core observation — instructions you repeat belong in CLAUDE.md — shipped as a personal usage report: an HTML page with suggestions you copy-paste by hand, Claude Code only. Context Autopilot is the pipeline version: it also mines Cursor history, attaches your verbatim quotes as evidence to every rule, runs an explicit approve/reject flow, writes accepted rules into managed blocks in both CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md (so Codex/Copilot/Cursor benefit), maintains a global cross-project rules file, and adds a CI staleness check. Fully open source and local.

How is this different from Claude Code's auto-memory? Auto-memory captures what the model notices live, in the moment, in one harness. Autopilot is retroactive and systematic: it mines months of existing history across tools, and finds cross-session patterns (you said it 6× in 4 sessions) that no single live session can see.

Troubleshooting

• "Skill not found" / agent can't see the tools — MCP servers load at session start. After installing, start a new session (resumed/old sessions won't have the tools), and say "MCP tools" rather than a slash command: "Using the context-autopilot MCP tools, distill this project's context proposals."
• Everything else (evidence presentation, approval flow, error hints) is built into the server itself — the tool results tell the agent exactly what to show and when to ask you.

Privacy

Everything runs on your machine. Transcripts are parsed locally; only the extracted signals (short quotes of your own instructions) are sent to the model you already use for coding. Nothing is uploaded anywhere else, ever.

Roadmap

Coding agents are chapter one. The engine is source-agnostic — it distills observations of work into Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs):

• Now: Claude Code + Cursor sessions → CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md; global cross-project rules (--global); staleness detection (ctxlayer stale)
• Next: team-shared context; a GitHub Action for context linting in CI
• Later: browser-workflow observation → AOPs for web tasks; ambient capture — until agents absorb the work you repeat, without you ever "building an agent"

License

MIT © The Context Layer