AGNTCon + MCPCon Japan 2026

Technical debt lives in code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt, Addy Osmani's term for the goals, constraints, and rationale behind a decision that never got written down, lives nowhere. It's the one debt agents can't pay down: an agent drafting a spec fills the gap with a confident guess, and the guess is usually wrong.

This talk covers building context graphs that capture the why: connecting decisions to the document threads and ticket discussions where humans actually made them, then exposing that structure to agents alongside code and data. I'll draw on an open-source toolkit that bootstraps context graphs from existing work artifacts (workspace threads, ticket histories) and the modeling questions that turned out hard: what separates a decision from a discussion, and when capture should run as a background process versus an explicit act.

Vendors now race to pitch "context layers for agents." I'll argue the differentiator isn't collection but connection: rationale linked to the entities, people, and prior choices it affects: queryable, not just retrievable.

You'll leave with patterns for making the why available to every agent that touches your work.