The Log Is the Agent
46 points
7 hours ago
| 9 comments
| arxiv.org
| HN
lukebuehler
2 hours ago
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Very cool. I settled on the same/similar design in my agent harness.

All relevant events that affect the context window are stored in an event log. Forking agents and sessions is simply setting a pointer to the sequence number of another event log.

So if you want to check an implementation of this pattern see: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/lightspeed

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jamiegregz
1 hour ago
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> In this arrangement the log is a byproduct: an audit artifact written alongside the real computation, never the substrate of it.

I’ve come to the same conclusion building my own agents. It simply feels ‘wrong’ that most frameworks will happily mutate your context. You have to explicitly go out of your way to store the original events. I’ve now started storing an event log for my own agents, this is used as the source of truth for deriving all subsequent context.

The great thing about this is that I have finer control over drift in long runs, as I can look back through the conversation/tool history and build context suitable for the current state of the agent. It also allows me to run compactions across the entire event history instead of ‘compactions on top of compactions’ which happens on long runs with checkpoints.

It definitely feels like this will be a bigger issue going forward as we have agents running longer and more complex workflows, I’ve started building a product aimed at addressing this issue in a framework agnostic way. [0]

[0]: https://statefabric.dev

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spike021
1 hour ago
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Why not save progress and important results of a conversation (i.e. including tool calls and such) to a project markdown (even multiple as needed) and clear your context window completely rather than compacting many times? You can then just specify a markdown file to be included as context. Especially if following any kind of plan document and executing on a part of it.
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bigcat12345678
2 hours ago
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This is true after learning this framing.

It's more like the log is the only user/agent accepted consensus. It has to be the grounding base. Although extending it into an agentic system architecture becomes something not necessarily effective in practice.

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lmwnshn
2 hours ago
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With my database hat on, in the context of agentic systems I would argue that write-ahead logs form a good (and potentially transactional) interface between speculative agent work and durable world mutations [0].

That said, there are a _lot_ of "logs for agents" papers that I've read (and unfortunately gotten assigned to review) which are basically "we asked claude to hack on a graph DB and generate a paper".

[0] https://onewill.ai/blog/2026/stealing-50-years-of-database-i...

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klntsky
1 hour ago
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Can someone explain why such a trivial knowhow is paper-worthy? Event sourcing is well known
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try-working
19 minutes ago
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This is one of the most interesting papers I've seen. Someone said it's AI slop, well I sent it to 5.5 Pro and it was a great read.
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rufasterisco
2 hours ago
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https://activegraph.ai/

The paper’s pip library can be tried here

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tern
2 hours ago
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Arrived at a version of this view as well and building one on Elixir/Ash.
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corgihamlet
3 hours ago
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My log has a message for you.
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ares623
1 hour ago
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if the folks at Anthropic/OpenAI can stop their loops for one second they would've figured this out too

but wouldn't feeding that log for each request/response iteration must get expensive really fast no?

also "We discuss--without claiming to demonstrate--" wtf? someone had a showerthought and slopped this out in 10mins to see what others thought?

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