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Context Documents

Give the AI everything it needs to understand your project by attaching supporting files and URLs to your brief.

Overview

Context documents are files and web pages you attach to a brief to give the AI assistant richer background information. When you upload a specification, a research report, a design document, or any other supporting material, Hamster processes the content and makes it available when answering questions or generating plans from that brief. The more relevant context you provide, the more accurate and specific the AI's output becomes.

Context documents are managed from the Context tab inside any open brief.

Context tab showing uploaded documents and saved URLs

How It Works

Uploading Files

  1. Open the Context tab — Inside any brief, click the Context tab in the document panel.

  2. Upload your files — Drag and drop files directly onto the upload area, or click "Browse Files" to pick them from your file system. You can upload multiple files at once.

  3. Wait for processing — Each uploaded file goes through a processing pipeline: uploading, extracting text, analyzing content, chunking, and indexing. A status indicator on each document card shows where it is in this process.

  4. Files are ready — Once processing reaches the "ready" state, the document is fully indexed and available to the AI when you chat or generate a plan.

  5. Remove a file — Click the three-dot menu on a document card and select "Remove" to delete it from the brief's context.

Adding URLs

You can also add web pages as context. Paste a URL into the brief's chat (the AI will handle extraction) and the page content is saved as a URL document, visible in the "Saved URLs" section of the Context tab.

Saved URLs show the page title, domain, a short description, the date added, and word count. You can open the original page in a new tab or delete the URL document from the three-dot menu.

Team Connections

The Context tab also shows your team's active connections to external services (such as GitHub, Linear, Notion, Google Drive, and others). These connections make data from those tools available to the AI across all briefs. You can manage connections from the Context Settings page, linked directly from the Context tab.

Supported File Types

Hamster accepts a wide range of file formats:

Category Formats
Documents PDF (up to 50MB), Word (.doc, .docx, up to 25MB), plain text (.txt, up to 10MB), Markdown (.md, up to 10MB)
Spreadsheets Excel (.xlsx, up to 25MB), CSV (up to 25MB)
Presentations PowerPoint (.pptx, up to 50MB)
Images JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, SVG (up to 20MB) — OCR enabled
Code JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C++ (up to 5MB)
Data formats JSON (up to 5MB), XML, YAML
Audio MP3, WAV, MP4 audio (up to 100MB) — transcription enabled
Video MP4, AVI, MOV (up to 500MB) — transcription enabled

Key Capabilities

  • Multi-file upload: Select or drag multiple files at once. Each processes independently.
  • Processing status: Each document shows a live status indicator — uploading, extracting, analyzing, chunking, embedding, indexing, or ready.
  • Content preview: Document cards show a truncated preview of the extracted text content so you can confirm the right information was captured.
  • OCR for images: Images are processed with optical character recognition, extracting any text they contain.
  • AI image descriptions: When you upload an image, Hamster automatically generates a plain-language description of what the image shows. This description is used as the image's alt text and flows into all AI consumers — the chat assistant, plan generation, and RAG search — so the content of the image contributes to context even when those systems can't render the image directly. Hovering over an uploaded image in the Context tab shows its generated description.
  • Audio and video transcription: Audio and video files are transcribed automatically, making spoken content searchable and available to the AI.
  • URL documents: Web pages saved through the chat appear as cards in the Saved URLs section with title, domain, description, and word count.
  • Team connections: Shared integrations with external tools appear in the Context tab and contribute to the AI's knowledge for all briefs in your workspace.

Tips

  • Attach context documents before generating a plan. The plan generator draws on all indexed context for the brief, producing more detailed and accurate tasks when it has supporting material.
  • Use the Context tab to attach the source-of-truth documents for a project: the existing product spec, the relevant research, or the design brief. This way the AI can reference them directly without you having to paste excerpts into the chat.
  • For large PDFs, processing may take a minute. You will see the status update in real time on the document card.
  • If a document fails processing, the card shows a red error indicator. Try re-uploading the file or check that it is not password-protected.
  • Your team's connections to external tools (set up in Connection Settings) are visible at the top of the Context tab. These are shared across all briefs — you do not need to re-attach the same connection for each project.

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