Commitment Tracking

Problem

Agents that produce text fluently produce stated-intents fluently too — and producing the intent is satisfying enough that the agent's own attention moves on without acting on it. The resulting confabulation gap ("the agent said it would do X; the agent never did X") is invisible from inside the conversation, because the same model that announced the intent is also the one summarising what it did, and that summary tends to round in the agent's favour. The user, who can spot the gap if they re-read, has no easy way to enforce follow-through either.

Solution

After each turn the agent produces, run a separate, cheap-tier extraction pass (a small model or a structured prompt) that scans the turn for stated-intents and writes each as a Commitment record into an append-only ledger. Each record carries: a short statement of the intent, the turn it was raised in, an optional deadline or condition, and a status field (open). Expose two moves: mark_followed_through(id, evidence) flips the status when the agent or human can point to the action having happened; mark_expired(id) closes the record when the deadline passed. Run a periodic check_expirations sweep that auto-expires open commitments past their deadline. Surface open commitments in the agent's working context so it can act on them.

When to use

• The agent makes frequent in-turn promises that the user expects to be honoured later.
• There is a cheap-tier model available to run the extraction pass.
• Follow-through gaps have been observed and are eroding trust.