The question we hear most about anything that runs on its own is some version of “how do I know it didn’t miss something?” The honest answer is that you can’t, unless it tells you what it looked at.
Results alone hide the quiet failures
A list of 12 flagged invoices tells you what the system found. It doesn’t tell you whether it read 400 invoices or 40. Without that, a quiet day and a broken connection look the same.
What a useful log says
- The systemWhat it readWhich sources, how many items, for what period
- The systemWhat it did with eachCleared, changed, drafted or flagged
- The systemWhat it wasn’t sure aboutHanded to a person, not decided
- A personWho approved whatAnd when
It has to be readable by the person who owns the process, not only by whoever built it. If it takes an engineer to interpret, it isn’t a log. It is a debug file.
It changes what trust means
Nobody should have to trust an automated system. They should be able to check it in 2 minutes over coffee, and stop checking when it has earned that. Can I trust what AI produces? has the short version.
