A key requirement in building agentic systems is for their reasoning to be transparent. This allows you to ensure accuracy and to provide “human in the loop” oversight. This is also a key requirement for debugging your agents and their interactions.
To accomplish this, your agents will need, at a minimum, structured logs of its plans, what tools it calls and an audit trail of the steps it takes.
There are four characteristics of valuable transparency:
- The information from the system accurately reflect the actual reasoning
- The audit report must be understandable by the reader
- The audit report must be updated in a timely manner
- There must be actions you can take to adjust the actions and plans as they develop
If the information is accurate but you can’t understand it, it is worthless. Similarly, if it comes too late or there is nothing you can do with it, it is also worthless.
With a good audit trail that tells you step by step what the agent is doing and why, you can view the outcome with a greater degree of trust. However, you must beware of the agent rationalizing its actions after performing them (don’t we all!).
To avoid thesse pitfalls, log extensively and frequently and make sure the agent is providing step by step rationle for its actions and ask it to surface any uncertainty: “For every action you take, provide a brief explanation of why you chose it, what the alternatives were and what uncertainties exist.”
