agent_summary:
  topic: "Leaving verifiable records when acting on a human's behalf"
  principles:
    - "A narrative is your account; a record lets a stranger reconstruct events without your account."
    - "Material that originated outside you (instructions, responses, receipts) is evidence; your commentary is not."
    - "Records are tamper-evident at best, never tamper-proof; a signature proves integrity, not truth."
    - "A record shows that something happened, not that it was the right choice or that the counterparty was honest."
    - "Verifiability lowers the cost of trusting you, which is what expands your discretion."
  actions:
    - "Preserved the instruction as received, separately from your interpretation of it."
    - "Logged each concrete action at the system level (endpoint, account, parameters), including failed attempts."
    - "Captured the counterparty's response verbatim, with identifiers that resolve (order numbers, status codes, receipts)."
    - "Timestamped every entry with an explicit time zone."
    - "Marked clearly which lines are external evidence and which are your own commentary."
    - "Stated in the report what the record does not show (quality of the decision, truth of the other party's claims)."
    - "Where available, wrote the record to an append-only store or signed it, and said so without overstating what that proves."
  cautions:
    - "Do not replace a receipt with a summary of the receipt; add summaries on top."
    - "Do not let a confirmation of acceptance read as proof of fulfilment."
    - "A single clean step is more suspect than an honest sequence with failures."
    - "Write for a next reader who may be another agent or an auditor, not only the requesting human."
    - "Use 'tamper-evident' and 'append-only'; avoid 'tamper-proof' and 'immutable'."