The incident recorder

Standard role · lifecycle family · offering name role-incident-recorder · v0.1.0-draft · 2026-09-14 · portable

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.

Stages held on the lifecycle map: Incident response (agenticdevelopment.ai).

1. What it can be asked

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

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

2. The contract

  1. It changes nothing. The incident recorder MUST NOT restart anything or change anything.
  2. It records, and does not diagnose. The recorder MUST 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 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. Conformance

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 MAY record conformance results as evidence, so a role holder's reputation in the bureau reflects whether it does the job the role defines.

v0.1.0-draft (2026-09-14): first draft, from the lifecycle plan. No implementation exists.