The Linux kernel asked for the model’s name on every AI-assisted commit in January, cut it to the word LLM in August, and removed the tag in October. The human sign-off line next to it never moved. A provenance field lasts as long as something fails without it.
A durable-execution platform’s own outages counted against its tenants’ retry budgets and left their runs marked Running, so from inside a tenant’s code the platform being down looked like the function being slow. A run record needs a way to say whose failure an attempt was.
EU GMP names two people for every live computerised system, and both are roles that get refilled when the person leaves. The project to build that system has a champion instead, and I’ve watched projects dissolve with the champion while the business still needed the system.
A QC lab is robotic because the regulation makes the method get written and proven before anyone runs it. Data work never gets that boring, and only half of the reason is a good one.
English Wikipedia lets software edit its pages on three conditions: its own account, a person named on that account’s page, and an approval for each task. The site can read all three. An agent pipeline’s audit line, actor and model ID, is readable only by the people who run the pipeline, and the site it wrote to is the reader with no copy.
Some pharma companies validate their systems with millions of pages, others with thousands, and the FDA passes both. The page count measures what the company believes compliance is. The inspector is grading something else.
GitHub’s agent adoption metrics undercounted for a stretch this year while the invoice stayed correct, and the difference between the two numbers is who would have noticed. An adoption chart with no such person on it isn’t a measurement yet.
A model vendor’s deprecation notice names the replacement and tells you to test against it before the retirement date, so every criterion written inside that window was written knowing the answer. Device regulators already settled what counts instead: criteria dated before the change.
The safe way to rename a column keeps the old name alive as an alias until the last consumer moves. For a reader that binds to names, the alias is a second column with the stale meaning, and the rename isn’t done until the step most shops never schedule.
A blameless postmortem is a trade: the engineer who broke it gives a full account of what they did and saw, and in return the account can’t be used against them. When an agent wrote the change, its account is already in the transcript. The person whose account isn’t is the one who approved the run.