The user_message parameter was accepted by get_prefetch_context but intentionally discarded, with the rationale that passing it would
expose conversation content in server access logs.
This rationale is inconsistent: Honcho already persists every message in full via saveMessages. The content is already in the database. A search query in an access log adds negligible additional exposure, and is moot for self-hosted Honcho deployments where the operator owns the logs.
Without search_query, Honcho returns the full peer representation -
all observations, deductive/inductive layers, and peer card - in
insertion order. When contextTokens is set, the most useful parts
(peer card, dialectic conclusions) are truncated because raw
observations fill the budget first.
Passing user_message as search_query enables Honcho's semantic
retrieval to return only conclusions relevant to the current session
topic, reducing injection noise and improving context quality on cold starts.
The _fetch_peer_context method already accepts and passes search_query to the Honcho API. This change simply connects the two.
0a7cc85eab