Agent Pointed Context: design records and payload specification

Abstract

Companion record to the paper "Agent Pointed Context: letting a person point an AI agent at what they see, without sharing the screen" (Tomas Neira, 2026, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23382909). Agent Pointed Context (APC) is an interaction pattern in which an application exposes three identifier-only channels to any external agent connected over the Model Context Protocol (MCP): the person's current view, a pin the person places on a part of the screen, and the agent's presence on screen. This record contains the primary sources the paper cites for its reference implementation in the PFA personal-finance ledger: 01-agent-view-context.md: design record of the view channel (get_current_view, parameter allowlist, grant trimming, deep links). Shipped 8 October 2026. 02-agent-presence.md: design record of presence and the pin (agent marks, private broadcast channel, drag-to-pin, the agent_focus table, the attention envelope, wait_for_focus, the agent cursor). Shipped 10 October 2026. 03-agent-focus-everywhere.md: design record extending the pin to parts of records and to computed figures (kind + id + part + params, get_tile_data, get_figure, the figure registry, hashed bank-text keys). Shipped 12 October 2026. 04-payload-specification.md: the consolidated wire format of the three channels: stored rows, tool results, the envelope, the presence message, pin kinds, the figure registry, the switches, and the tests that cover them. README.md and apc-companion.pdf: guide to the record and all files combined in one PDF. Files 01 to 03 are internal planning documents published verbatim; they were written before and during the builds they describe and are the source of the dates, catalog versions, migration numbers and live checks the paper reports. Apart from a short note at the top of files 01 to 03 and one link in file 01 (a private planning workspace, replaced by plain text), nothing was changed. The record contains no ledger data, bank statements, account identifiers, credentials or configuration. Examples use shortened illustrative identifiers and, where amounts appear, a synthetic ledger labeled as such. The PFA application and its MCP server are not released.