Building My Personal Context Portfolio

I recently listened to an episode of The AI Daily Brief called “How to Build a Personal Context Portfolio” and it immediately clicked. We spend so much time giving our AI tools piecemeal instructions about our preferences, our roles, and our projects. It makes total sense to consolidate all of that into a single, structured repository.

So I built one.

If you want to jump straight to the code, you can find my public Personal Context Portfolio on GitHub at khodo-lab/keithhodo-personal-context-portfolio.

The Context Repetition Tax

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We officially live in the agentic era. When you work with AI agents or tools like Kiro, context is everything. An AI can write a script or draft a document, but if it doesn’t know your specific constraints, your coding style, or your professional background, the output is generic. You end up spending extra cycles correcting the tone or tweaking the formatting to match what you actually wanted.

Before I built this portfolio, I was paying what the podcast called the “context repetition tax.” Every time I set up a new agent, switched devices, or started a fresh session, I had to re-explain myself from the ground up. I had to remind the AI about my role, my current projects, and my communication preferences.

When you only use one or two tools, this is just a minor annoyance. But as you start orchestrating multiple agents across different workflows, it becomes completely untenable. The context repetition tax does not just waste time. It degrades the quality of the output. When you are tired of typing out the same instructions over and over, you start leaving things out, and the AI starts making assumptions.

Why a Context Portfolio?

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By maintaining a Personal Context Portfolio, you create a baseline truth for your AI tools to reference. It acts as an operating manual for any AI that works with you. Instead of dropping a raw model into your workspace and hoping it figures things out, you provide a single source of machine-readable truth.

Whenever I start a new session, the AI already knows I am a Partner Solutions Architect at AWS. It knows I prefer CDK over Terraform, and it knows my stance on writing clean, maintainable infrastructure as code.

Markdown First and Modular

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The most important design principle for this portfolio is that it is built entirely in Markdown. Every AI system on earth can read Markdown. It is the universal interchange format for context.

I also kept the portfolio modular rather than monolithic. I do not have one giant file that tries to explain my entire life. Instead, I broke it down into separate files for different dimensions of my work. This allows agents to grab exactly what is relevant for the task at hand and ignore the rest.

For example, here is a snippet from my identity.md file, which sets the baseline for who I am and what I do:

# Identity: Keith Hodo

**Location:** Kirkland & Seattle, WA
**Professional Focus:** Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
**Philosophy:** "Teaching AI to think before it builds"
**Community Handle:** Keith Hodo

And here is a look at my communication_style.md, which helps guide the tone and rigor of the AI output:

# Communication Style

## 🎨 Tone & Philosophy
- **"Keith Hodo" Style:** Direct, empathetic, and highly structured.
- **Engineering Rigor:** I prefer agents and collaborators who challenge assumptions and designs rather than offering simple "yes" responses.

I have other files for my current projects, team relationships, tools and systems, and hard constraints. Because the setup is version controlled, it is a living document. As my projects change or my priorities shift, the portfolio evolves with me.

Putting It to Work

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The real value unlocks when you integrate this portfolio into your daily workflows. If you use tools that support custom instructions or system prompts, you can simply point them to your context repository.

For my local setup, I integrate these principles directly into my Kiro skills and steering documents. Before the AI writes a single line of code or drafts a new blog post, it reviews my established context. The results are outputs that require far less editing and feel significantly more aligned with my actual voice and intent.

I highly recommend checking out The AI Daily Brief episode that sparked this idea. It is a fantastic listen and a great mental model for getting more leverage out of your AI tools. And if you want a template to start your own, feel free to fork my repository.

Keith