Look · Show me · it acts
Element 118
Look at what it did.
transcript · trace · activity log
The other half of the exchange is Report.
Earliest lead
Cited
1951Lead: EDSAC's checking routines trace a program as it runs, so you can look back at what it did. Gill, Cambridge.
See also: Codex returns terminal logs and test outputs as evidence of its actions, May 2025.
A trace, a record of the steps a machine took, is about as old as stored programs. The agent's activity log is that idea brought back.
A source is named, but nobody has re-opened it yet. The source.
Read on
Traces that draw which files an agent touched, so you can see the run instead of reading about it.
Maggie Appleton, Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces (2026)
- ReadingValue
Specimen № 118 — operate freely
Pick a line of its answer to see where it came from. Try every line.
Fig. 118 — Inspect
000 readings · idle
Anatomy of Inspect
- 01Ask why
- You
- Picks a line of the result.
- It
- Lights the steps it came from.
- 02Follow
- You
- Picks a step.
- It
- Lights everything that step produced.
- 03Notice
- You
- Finds a line with nothing behind it.
- It
- Shows the gap, rather than inventing a source.
Phases light as the specimen above registers them. The dark ones are the ones it can't sense.
Lineage
Programmers have read execution traces since the first debuggers. For agents the transcript came first: a log, in order, of everything it did. A trace that ties each part of the result to the steps behind it is the newer and rarer thing.
Under delegation
Survives
- Survives
- Mutates
- Dissolves
Born under delegation. When you did the work, you remember why each part is there. When something else did, the result arrives without its reasons, and inspecting is how you get them back. The useful question isn't what happened. It's what this line rests on.
Down the Look column
- it reactsGlGlance
- it followsSScroll
- it targetsHvHover
- it remembersZZoom
- it connectsBBrowse
- it guessesGaGaze
- it actsInInspect
Read down and Glance gets heavier: each step is the same act, on a machine that keeps track of more.
Bodies
The act stays put while the hardware changes. These are some of the forms Inspect takes.
- transcript
- trace
- activity log
From the 2021 table
These were tiles of their own. On this table each is a form of Inspect, and each old address lands here.
- ObserveRenamedThe same act, under a name that says what it does.
- OverseeIsotopeThe same act in another body.
- Agent SupervisionIsotopeThe same act in another body.