This framing resonates. The warehouse-for-humans analogy is exactly right, and "context architecture" is the right job title for what survives.

I've been converging on something similar from the agent systems / foundation model side. The way I've come to think about it: context engineering is index design.

Agents need a navigational metadata layer (what I'm calling context blocks) that sit above raw data and answers one question before the agent touches anything: "should I look here?"

It maps almost directly to Apache Iceberg's metadata architecture, just adapted for unstructured data where metadata has to be generated rather than computed.

Data blocks (raw content), context blocks (routing signals), a context graph (for traversal), and context snapshots (for time travel and drift detection). The agent reads the map first, then retrieves.

I wrote up the full architecture here if it's useful: bitsofchris.com/p/conte…