What is canonical context for coding agents?
Canonical context is the single current, authoritative document that answers a coding agent's question — served with a freshness marker, instead of a pile of candidate files the agent has to sift. Canonical means the one doc that is the source of truth for a topic, as opposed to stale or duplicate copies.
What makes context "canonical" rather than just relevant?
Relevance is similarity; canonical is authority plus freshness. A similarity search can return five files that all mention "deploy rollback" — including an old postmortem and a duplicate wiki page. Canonical context picks the one that is current and authoritative and labels the rest stale or duplicate, so the agent reads the right doc, not the most textually similar one.
Why does it matter for an agent?
Two reasons: cost and correctness. Serving one current section instead of the top few candidates is about 60% fewer tokens per lookup. And an agent that reads the canonical doc isn't quietly reasoning over an outdated copy — fewer confidently-wrong answers from stale instructions.
How is canonical context delivered?
By indexing your docs and routing each query to the source of truth, with a freshness signal attached. trovex is an open-source, local-first MCP server that does this: it returns the canonical doc as a path:line pointer with a canonical / stale / duplicate marker, serves the section that answers, and lets agents write canonical records back so the whole fleet shares one source of truth. It runs on your machine — SQLite + ONNX, no cloud or keys.
Serve your agents canonical context.
One current answer per query, with a freshness marker — in about a minute.
Open source. No cloud, no API keys. Your docs never leave your machine.