Sourcegraph deprecates Deep Search’s old context-filter key

Sourcegraph announced on October 15, 2026, that experimentalFeatures.deepSearch.contextFilters was deprecated in favor of experimentalFeatures.agents.contextFilters. The company says the old rules still apply on upgrade, but a future release will stop honoring them. The announcement names no removal version or date.

The changelog gives administrators two migration paths. If only the old key exists, rename it to agents.contextFilters within the experimentalFeatures block. If both keys exist, append the old key’s exclude rules to agents.contextFilters.exclude, then remove the old key. Sourcegraph says the rule format is unchanged.

The new name reflects a shared configuration: Sourcegraph says all of its own agents, including Deep Search and Agentic Batch Changes, read the exclusion rules. Its documentation says rules under either key are combined into one list. Administrators cannot use the two settings to give different agents different exclusions.

These filters control what repositories and files agents can see through their tools; they do not remove files from every batch-job checkout. According to the documentation, ordinary run steps can still read excluded files. Coding agent steps face a stricter restriction: because they use a full checkout, Sourcegraph refuses to run them in a repository containing excluded content.

The migration advice is less consistent than the configuration format. While the dated changelog describes eventual removal and explains how to move rules, the captured documentation says existing rules under the old key “keep working and need no migration.” Both pages agree that those rules remain effective for now. They differ on whether administrators need to move them, and the undated documentation does not establish which guidance came later.