Context collapse

When work moves to a new person or tool, the unwritten details that made it work get left behind, and private details that should have stayed put get carried along.

Your knee has been bad for two years, and you are finally switching to a new physical therapist. To save time you have an AI summarize your old records into a one page history and you email it ahead. At the first session the new therapist starts you on the exact hill loading program that wrecked your back in 2024, because that detail lived in your head, not the chart. Then she mentions, kindly, that she read about your divorce. That was in the file too.

Context collapse is a handoff that strips the tacit state the work depended on while carrying private state the work never needed. The tell is a receiver who is confident and specific about the wrong thing, plus a receiver who knows something about you that has no bearing on the task. Unnoticed, it costs you a reinjury and a boundary you cannot take back. The smallest correction is to write the handoff yourself in two lists before you send it: what a competent stranger would get wrong without being told, and what they do not need to see. Add the first list, cut the second, then send. What changes is that the new therapist asks about your back in minute one. False alarm if the receiver already worked with you and holds the context; over-trimming there just makes them ask again.