Sourcegraph moves agent exclusion rules to a shared agents.contextFilters key

Sourcegraph says it has deprecated the deepSearch.contextFilters setting and now wants administrators to put the rules that hide repositories and files from its AI agents under agents.contextFilters instead. The company announced the change in a changelog entry dated October 15, 2026.

Context filters are an admin-defined exclusion list: anything a filter matches is invisible to the agent. The older key predates Agentic Batch Changes. Sourcegraph says all of its own agents, including Deep Search and Agentic Batch Changes, now read their rules from experimentalFeatures.agents.contextFilters, and the older experimentalFeatures.deepSearch.contextFilters key is deprecated.

The changelog's advice is short: if only the old key is set, rename it; if both are set, append the old key's exclude rules to the new one and delete the old key. The rule shape is identical, and the entry's example excludes one repository by name pattern and files ending in .env and .pem by path pattern.

Per the changelog, rules under the deprecated key keep applying for now, so nothing changes on upgrade. The docs page adds that rules from both keys are combined into one list that every agent applies, and that there is no way to exclude content from just one agent.

What the company has not said is when the old key goes away. The changelog says only that "a future release" removes it, after which its rules are ignored. No version or date is given.

Sourcegraph's own pages do not line up on the old key. The changelog says the key is deprecated and will be removed. The docs page, as we fetched it on October 16, 2026, calls the old key one that "stays effective" and says rules already under it "keep working and need no migration". The docs page mentions no removal and is undated, so we cannot tell which page is newer. Sourcegraph has not explained the difference.

Sourcegraph's docs describe the filters as a way to keep secrets out of the agent's context. If the old key's rules are ignored after removal, as the changelog says they will be, content an admin meant to hide could become visible to agents. Whether to move rules now is the administrator's call: the changelog describes how to move them, and the docs say it is not needed.

This report rests on Sourcegraph's own pages. We found no independent coverage of this change, so everything above is the company's description of its own product, and we have not tested the behavior ourselves.

Revised 16 October 2026: Guth re-read the original sources and rewrote this article. The earlier version remains available as revision 1.