Why coding agents need shared context
Every coding agent starts knowing only what you tell it. When you move a task from Claude Code to Codex, or from one teammate to another, the context stays behind unless something carries it. Sharing context is what makes a second agent, or a second person, useful on the first one’s work.
What is Friday Work?
Friday Work is a multiplayer AI workspace for coding teams. Your people and your coding agents work in one live session: the same task, the same record, the same tools. It is a desktop app for Windows and Mac.
- Teammates join a session by link, watch every step, suggest changes and take control when it is their turn.
- Claude Code, Codex and Cursor run on your own machine and your own accounts, side by side in one session, with Friday’s own agent when you want it.
- Continue a Claude Code or Codex session you already have, instead of starting over.
- Plan, Manual or Auto: you decide what an agent may do, and approve its commands as a team.
- Connect GitHub, Slack, Linear and 50+ more tools over MCP once, and choose which agents may use them.
- Free to start. Pro is $20 a month ($18 a month billed yearly).
What is context, for a coding agent?
Context is everything the agent has learned about the task: what you asked, what it read, what it tried, what failed and why, and what you decided along the way. It is the difference between “fix the login bug” and “fix the login bug, which is not in the session code, we already ruled that out”.
Most of it lives in one conversation, in one tool, on one person’s machine.
What goes wrong when context is not shared?
- You switch from Claude Code to Codex and explain the task again from scratch.
- A teammate picks up your work and repeats the investigation you finished an hour ago.
- Two agents make different assumptions about the same code, because neither saw the other’s findings.
- Nobody can review a change without reading a whole private transcript, or guessing.
Each of these costs time, and each also costs tokens, because an agent that starts cold re-reads and re-tries what the last one already did.
What does it look like when it is shared?
| Situation | Without shared context | With one shared session |
|---|---|---|
| Switching from one coding tool to another | Re-explain the task | The next agent works from the same session record |
| A teammate joins | Read a transcript or ask you | They see every step, and catch up from a short digest |
| Handing work to a person or another agent | A pasted summary | A handoff that carries the task and its context |
| Reviewing what happened | Dig through a private chat | One record of who asked what, and what each agent did |
How does Friday share context?
Friday puts people and agents in one session. Everyone in it, and every agent, works from the same record: the messages, the tool calls and the file changes. You can run Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Friday’s own agent in the same session, each in its own lane, and hand work from one to the next. Handoffs between agents are on Pro and Max.
The agents themselves still run on your own machine and your own accounts.
What should you still pass on yourself?
Shared context does not replace a clear instruction. Say what “done” means, name the files that matter, and write down any decision an agent could not know. A short note at the start of a lane is worth more than a long transcript.
Common questions
Is shared context the same as a bigger context window?
No. A larger window lets one agent hold more. Shared context is about the same information reaching the next agent or person, instead of staying in one conversation.
Do different AI models see the same context in Friday?
They work from the same session. Each agent keeps its own way of reading it, so a clear instruction at the start of each lane still helps.
Does sharing context send my code to Friday?
Your coding agents run on your machine. The session record is what your team shares.