Mirrored verbatim from utopia-models/knowledge _rules/portfolio-bound-work-defaults-to-that-portfolios-context.md by the allowlisted publish pipeline. Edit it there, not here.

name: portfolio-bound-work-defaults-to-that-portfolios-context
cases: [2026-09-19-a-bound-portfolio-is-a-default-read-scope-not-a-label, 2026-10-03-portfolio-context-is-not-memory, 2026-10-06-an-attachment-with-no-words-gets-one-question, 2026-10-22-project-scope-is-a-property-of-the-session-not-a-rule-i-read]
status: active
audience: agent
last-recurrence: 2026-10-22

A plan's recorded portfolio: field is a read-scope instruction, not routing metadata

Fires when

work is bound to a plan with a portfolio: field set (every plan, via /plan-start Q2) and I am about to read, reason about, or act on files/context from a DIFFERENT portfolio — or when I catch myself pulling in ambient fleet-wide context instead of that portfolio's own docs first.

The rule

🔴 Reading discipline cannot enforce scope over what is already loaded (2026-10-22): the session carried 78.8 KB of mixed always-on text, including other projects' memory lines and hook output, before the plan bound. If asked what other projects are in my context, answer from the loaded text and say so; the structural fix is PLAN-405 (shared floor plus one project file), not more care in what I read.

Default every read to the bound plan's own portfolio: its README.md, components/, decisions/, recent plan/issue history — before reaching for fleet-wide context. Touching another portfolio is the rare exception and must be named explicitly, in the same turn, as a deliberate cross-portfolio step — never done silently and left for Tyler to notice. No PreToolUse gate enforces this; it is a discipline, same class as reading organization.yaml before reporting an infrastructure fact.

Cost when it fired

PLAN-313 (bound wi) and PLAN-311 (bound net, paused) were worked in the same session with no explicit switching signal — net's files were read and reasoned about mid-wi-plan without ever framing it as the cross-portfolio exception. Tyler named the pattern unprompted: "context assembly is very weak... I would also like for you to have context ONLY of the portfolio we are working on."