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
- Never. This is an anti-pattern documented to be avoided.
- It exists in the catalogue only to warn against shipping agents without traces or decision logs.
- Reading this entry should redirect you to provenance-ledger, decision-log, and lineage-tracking.
Open the full interactive page →
Diagram, neighbourhood map, code examples, related patterns and full provenance.