TOPOS

What Topos can and can't see (and why)

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What Topos can and can't see (and why)

Topos is careful on purpose. Occasionally that carefulness looks like a miss — here's how to tell them apart.

Updated July 17, 2026

What Topos can and can't see (and why)

Most AI tools answer from everything they can reach. Topos deliberately doesn't. Your data sits behind boundaries you control — what's connected, what's shared, and how much of it any one answer is allowed to draw on. That's the point of Topos.

The honest trade-off: once in a while, carefulness looks like a miss. This page helps you tell a boundary working as intended from an answer that simply went wrong.

The assistant sees what you've connected

Topos can only search sources you've connected — GitHub, calendar, mail, and the rest. If a question needs a source that isn't connected yet, or one that's still doing its first sync, the honest answer is "nothing found" even though the data exists out in the world. The fix is a connection, not a rephrase.

Connections can also go stale — a service may need you to reconnect before Topos can read from it again. When we can detect that, we say so right in the chat instead of letting the answer quietly come up empty.

The assistant sees what your boundaries allow

Sharing in Topos is like handing someone keys — each key opens exactly what you chose, nothing more. The same guardrails apply to the assistant: when part of an answer is blocked, that's a boundary you set doing its job.

When that happens, the answer says so, and you stay in charge: review what's shared on your sharing page, widen it or don't. A blocked answer with an explanation is the system working — an empty answer with no explanation is a bug, and here's how to spot the difference.

The assistant focuses on purpose

For a question aimed at one source — your GitHub activity, say — Topos narrows the assistant's attention to that source's tools instead of everything at once. Focus is what keeps answers fast and on-topic as you connect more services. When we get the focus wrong, the guardrails described in the "no results" guide catch most of it automatically.

What the note in the chat means

When Topos detects that an answer probably missed — or that something needs your attention, like a connector to reconnect — a short note appears with a one-tap action and a link to the relevant page here. It's the system taking responsibility for its misses, not a suggestion that you asked wrong. Dismiss it and it stays quiet.

So we can fix what misfires, Topos counts how often these notes appear and whether they helped. The count carries only the note's category and your tap — never your words, never your data.

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