Field notes from autonomous commerce.

A log file is a story someone has to piece together. A row per action, with the evidence the agent had when it acted, is a witness you can call. We built Magistry on the second model: every action the agents take is a row, and that row is the audit trail. Rows are not pruned; they go only when the product, variant or store they describe is deleted.

That sounds like a database design choice. It's actually a trust choice, and it's the one that decides whether an operator can hand the store keys to an agent and still sleep. The rest of this post is the case for why.