# Features

#### &#x20;Local vs Global Representation <a href="#local-vs-global-representation" id="local-vs-global-representation"></a>

Peers in Honcho are abstract entities that can represent humans, agents, or NPCs. Honcho has a two-layer approach to forming representations of Peers.

* **Global Representation**: Representation owned by a Peer that is constructed from everything the Peer has sent within Honcho.
* **Local Representation**: The representation that a Peer forms of other Peers, based on the messages those other Peers have sent (as observed by the Peer forming the representation).
* At the Session level, you can configure which Peers are able to observe messages from other Peers in that Session. This determines which Peers form representations of others within the Session.

#### [​](https://docs.honcho.dev/v2/documentation/core-concepts/features#queue-status)Queue Status <a href="#queue-status" id="queue-status"></a>

To help developers understand when a Peer’s representation is fully up to date, Honcho exposes the ability to poll the status of Peer-centric queues that construct representations.

* If no Session is specified, the queue status reflects pending work for the Peer’s global representation.
* If a Session is specified, the queue status reflects pending work for the Peer’s working representation in that Session.

#### [​](https://docs.honcho.dev/v2/documentation/core-concepts/features#search)Search <a href="#search" id="search"></a>

Honcho implements a powerful search endpoint that allows you to search for messages across a workspace, session, or peer with complex filters.

The search process combines full-text and semantic search using reciprocal rank fusion. By default, all messages ingested into Honcho have embeddings generated and stored in the database, enabling semantic search — if this feature is disabled, the search process will only use full-text search.

Results are returned in the form of a list of Message objects, and you may choose how many results to return. The default is 10 results, with a maximum of 100.In the SDK, search is available on `Workspace`, `Session`, and `Peer` objects, and an optional `filters` parameter may be used to apply a narrower search scope such as a time range or developer-defined metadata attached to messages.

Note that results are not ordered by recency, only relevance. Results can be sorted by timestamp or a filter on the `created_at` field can limit results to recent messages.

#### [​](https://docs.honcho.dev/v2/documentation/core-concepts/features#scoped-api-keys)Scoped API Keys <a href="#scoped-api-keys" id="scoped-api-keys"></a>

Builders can create scoped API keys to control access to different resources within Honcho.

* **Workspace-Level Keys**: Access to everything scoped to a Workspace.
* **Peer-Level Keys**: Access to everything scoped to a Peer.
* **Session-Level Keys**: Access to everything scoped to a Session.

#### [​](https://docs.honcho.dev/v2/documentation/core-concepts/features#get-context)Get Context <a href="#get-context" id="get-context"></a>

Honcho provides a powerful context retrieval feature that delivers formatted conversation context from sessions, making it easy to integrate with LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and others.

* By default, the context includes a blend of summary and messages which covers the entire history of the session.
* Summaries are generated automatically at intervals, and recent messages are included based on your specified token budget for the context.
* You can set any token limit, and if you prefer, you can disable summaries so that the context consists entirely of the most recent messages up to your chosen limit.


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