Black-Box Opaqueness
Anti-pattern: ship an agent without traces, decision logs, or provenance, then debug from user reports.
Problem
When the agent eventually does something wrong, and it will, the team has no record of what the agent saw, what it decided, or which tool it called with which arguments. Debugging collapses into trying to reproduce a user's vague timeline from memory, and most incidents are never explained at all. The team ends up retrofitting traces during an outage, which is the most expensive moment to add them.
Solution
Don't. Add traces, decision logs, and provenance from day one. See provenance-ledger, decision-log, lineage-tracking.
When to use
- Cite this entry when a team proposes shipping an agent whose only failure signal is user reports.
- You are already here if production incidents cannot be replayed from traces or decision logs.
- Exit via provenance-ledger, decision-log, and lineage-tracking before launch, not after the first incident.
Open the full interactive page →
Diagram, neighbourhood map, code examples, related patterns and full provenance.