Problem
People cannot judge an answer if they do not know which files or workspace content the assistant could access.
Solution
Show a short list of the documents, projects, or datasets available for the current request. Let people add or remove items near the message field.
Start with the content relevant to the current task, such as the open document. Make it easy to expand that selection. Respect access permissions when listing and retrieving material.
Distinguish what the assistant could use from what it actually used in an answer. Show when the selection changes, especially after navigating to another part of the app.
Use when
Answers depend on which part of a workspace the assistant can access.
Don’t use when
The assistant has exactly one possible scope and no way to change it. A chip showing the only document that could ever be in play is noise dressed as control.
Trade-offs
Explicit selection adds work, but automatic selection can be hard to understand. Wider access can introduce irrelevant material and use more context space. Different permissions can give colleagues different answers, so the available material needs to be visible.
Checklist
- Can the viewer see what’s in scope without asking?
- Can they add and remove items in one action?
- Is the default the narrow scope or the broad one?
- Is scope bounded by the viewer’s own permissions, and is that stated?
- Does the answer say which of the in-scope items it actually used?
- Does scope persist across turns, and across navigation?
- How does scope interact with the context budget?
- What happens when an in-scope document changes mid-conversation?
- Is scope carried into a shared conversation, and should it be?
- Can two colleagues tell why they got different answers?
Compare
Notion composes scope through @-mentions in the prompt, so the working set is typed into the question and visible in the text itself. Claude uses projects as the unit, where a deliberately assembled set of documents is the scope and the boundary is something the viewer built. Microsoft Copilot scopes to the tenant with permission trimming. It has the broadest reach of anything here, and the per-person boundary becomes the defining design problem. Cursor shows the working set as an explicit, editable list of files, treating scope as something to curate rather than infer and assuming a user who wants that job.
Related
Assistant sidebar often displays the selected context. Attachment tray adds external files. Command menu provides shortcuts for selecting items.
Source list identifies the material used in an answer. Context meter shows how much information fits in the current request.