The trace record

A trace record is a record of human direction and machine execution. It keeps a session’s instructions in their original words and links them to the agent’s choices, the checks and the resulting changes, so that you, or a collaborator who joins later, can reconstruct the work.

File	What it holds
evidence.json	Your exact words: prompts, answers you gave in the agent’s question dialog, and captured review comments, with declared redactions.
summary.md	Your ideas and interventions, citing the turn IDs they come from.
coverage.json	Each captured turn, marked covered or explicitly excluded.
checks.jsonl	One row per check: the candidate, the criterion, the method, who ran it, the result, the artifact, the sources it compared the candidate with when it names them, and the limits, meaning what it did not cover.
decisions.jsonl	The decision account, only when a consequential choice was made: the question, who proposed and who selected it, the reason it was taken over the alternatives, the inputs it used, under what authority, and who owns it. Each choice is recorded when it is made.
publication.json	The disclosure review, bound to the current files. Any later change invalidates it.

An agent session that commits work keeps one record; a commit a person typed owes none. The record is drafted in ignored workspace/record-staging/, read and redacted, and then promoted to ai/records/<id>/. Before each commit, one command runs that routine and drafts the commit body from the record, and a later commit of the same session updates the same record without renumbering a turn or rewriting a choice or check already promoted. A record does not establish that the work is complete or correct, and its disclosure review is not acceptance; see Review states.