Expand description
Agents asking for help.
A lights-out factory’s worst failure is not a crash — a crash is loud. It is an agent that quietly cannot do the thing it was asked to do, produces something plausible anyway, and passes it downstream. The way out is for the agent to say so, in a form a human can act on without reconstructing the run.
§Why this is not just a log line
Logs are written for the run; a help request is written for a person who is not watching. It needs to survive the run, be findable without knowing which run produced it, and carry enough to act on. That makes it a record, not a message.
§The text is not trusted
summary and detail are written by an agent explaining why something did not work, and the
commonest reason is a credential. They are therefore redacted and capped on the way in — see
redact — because from here they go to disk, to an unauthenticated HTTP API and to a
dashboard, and none of those can take it back.
§What the shape is for
Every field here exists to answer a question somebody asks when they open the dashboard and find work stopped: what is stuck, why, was it fatal, and has it been happening?
The categories come from measurement rather than imagination. In a sibling project’s help file,
five of six entries were permission or access failures — a denied tool guard, a denied git
read, an HTTP 422, a TLS handshake. Blocker::Access is the common case by a wide margin,
and it is worth being able to filter for it.
Modules§
- redact
- Taking credentials out of text an agent wrote.
Structs§
- Help
Request - One agent asking a human for something.
Enums§
- Blocker
- What kind of thing an agent is stuck on.