The book’s vocabulary

Retrieval scope

Tenant, user, purpose — established before anything is searched.

From The World That Agrees With You1 section of the book1 related post

Determine tenant, user, and purpose before searching memory, and restrict retrieval before selecting for relevance. A release workflow should not search every personnel review and personal conversation and then ask the model to ignore what it found.

An identifier is not authorization: neither “I am Alice” in a prompt nor a model-produced owner field should grant access to Alice’s records. Scope must come from trusted application code after authentication.

Definition from The World That Agrees With You: Understanding and Managing Sycophancy in the Age of AI, by Timothy O’Brien. © 2026 Timothy O’Brien. All rights reserved.

In the book

See also

  • Request boundary
  • Memory stores
  • Context isolation