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69 changes: 69 additions & 0 deletions agent-signals/README.md
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Expand Up @@ -284,6 +284,75 @@ remediation sessions:

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## Two Capture Paths, Two Reliability Profiles

Here's something we learned the hard way, and it shaped the whole protocol:
**you will lose execution signals, and that's the reason outcome signals exist.**

An execution signal is a self-report. It only gets captured if the agent is
still running, the session is still open, and the emit step actually fires
before the developer closes the terminal. In practice, a lot of them never
make it out. In our own production system, we captured thousands of execution
signals — but far fewer than the number of tasks the agents actually completed.
The rest were lost to closed sessions and interrupted runs.

That loss is not a bug you can fully engineer away. It's the nature of
self-assessment: it depends on the speaker being present and willing to speak.

The outcome signal is different. It doesn't depend on the agent remembering
anything. The work product — the PR, the commit, the change — is *durable*.
It exists in the system whether or not the CLI stayed open. So an independent
evaluator can grade it later, on its own schedule, with no dependency on the
original session.

This is the same distinction that shows up everywhere in trustworthy AI:

- **Honesty** is a property of the *speaker*. It's unverifiable from outside,
and — as we learned — it can be lost entirely if the speaker never gets to
report.
- **Transparency** is a property of the *system*. The artifact is there,
checkable by anyone with access, regardless of what the agent said or
whether it said anything at all.

You need both signal types precisely *because* self-report is fragile. The
execution signal tells you what the agent believed, when you can get it. The
outcome signal is the durable ground truth you can always recover. The gap
between them is the calibration measurement — and it's trustworthy *because*
one leg of it doesn't depend on the agent's cooperation.

**Design implication:** don't build your trust story on execution signals
alone. Anchor it to something durable. Treat execution signals as valuable-
but-lossy self-report, and treat outcome signals as the verifiable backbone.
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A system that can only self-report is a system you're trusting on faith. A
system where the outcome is independently checkable is a system you can
actually verify — even on the runs where the agent never got to speak.

## Related Industry Direction

Frontier model providers are shipping architectures that separate capability
from verification.

Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 (2026) expose the same base model
through two tiers: a generally-available tier (Fable 5) with external safety
classifiers that intercept high-risk requests and route them to a fallback
model, and a restricted tier (Mythos 5) without those classifiers, available
only to vetted partners. The two tiers differ not in capability but in the
safeguards and vetting applied around access.
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We read this as consistent with the premise behind Agent Signals: capability
alone isn't the thing to manage — verification is. Access-tiering addresses
*who* operates with which safeguards. Signal calibration addresses a different,
complementary question: *whether an agent's self-reported reliability holds up
against independent evaluation, over time.* The calibration gap between what an
agent claims about its own work and what an independent evaluation confirms is
a number you can track run over run.
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The through-line with the research cited earlier — OpenAI on honest
self-report, Anthropic on scalable oversight, Microsoft on collaboration — is
that systems designed for verification tend to outperform systems that ask you
to take reliability on faith. Agent Signals is a measurement layer for that
kind of verification.

## Getting Started

### 1. Add a signals directory to your project
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