1. Crash edge case: If an agent executes a side-effect and dies before signing the receipt, is that action orphaned? Any WAL-style intent/completion model?
2. Multi-step workflows: Do receipts chain natively (parent pointers/Merkle) or via external linking? (I see storage/ledgers are out of scope, but curious about the linkage design.)
The negative proof angle (proving AI didn't touch prod) is compelling for compliance.
1) Crash/orphan side-effect: agreed this needs an intent/commit model. The clean pattern is WAL-style: emit/sign an “INTENT” receipt before side-effect + a “COMMIT” receipt after; absence of COMMIT is itself evidence (“we can’t attest completion”). Another option is tool-level signing so the side-effecting tool returns a signed result that the agent includes.
2) Linking: yes linkage can be native without building storage. Next iteration is parent_hash (or prev_hash) inside the signed_block so receipts naturally chain; Merkle/log indexing stays external.