Reddit thread: how should agents log the decisions where they choose not to act?
daani_maas · reddit · 2026-09-29
A Reddit post highlights a blind spot in agent engineering: most automation logs capture actions (tool calls, results, errors), but for recurring tasks the no-op decisions matter too. The author's workflow needs to distinguish at least four reasons for skipping: low evidence, duplicate contribution, stale context, and rule conflicts — otherwise the next run repeats research or treats silence as success. They propose a compact negative-decision record: candidate ID, evidence checked, rejection code, short rationale, and an expiry/retry condition that lets the next run reuse it until conditions change. The thread asks whether such records actually improve future runs or just create more state that itself goes stale.
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