Zach Zayac

Projects / WITAN

Cortex — Extreme Observability

Live

The observability spine: every agent run traced, verifiable, and explainable in plain language.

Updated

What problem it solves

Multi-agent systems have a credibility problem: the more moving parts, the easier it is for a wrong answer to look right. Worse than visible failure is the invisible kind — the step that “succeeded” on garbage inputs, the confidence number that was really a storage default, the summary that quietly replaced the evidence. Witan’s entire thesis (many small models instead of one big one) is worthless if the handoffs between models can’t be inspected. Cortex is that inspection surface — and the discipline behind it.

The thesis

If you can’t see the work, you don’t have a system — you have a story about one. Every agent run must be its own recorded event carrying the verbatim input it received, the exact assembled prompt it ran with, and the verbatim output it produced. Summaries may sit on top of the evidence but never replace it. And the surface that displays all this must always be the truth — the one rule in the project with no exceptions: Cortex must always be the truth.

A traced handoff Three agents hand work along a chain; each run records verbatim input, the exact assembled prompt, and verbatim output; a verification guard checks that every output field traces back to an input. EVERY RUN IS ITS OWN EVENT, CHAINED BY PARENT LINKS Date-finder one narrow job typed envelope Relatedness judge semantic check value · confidence · source Executor acts, with undo ▪ verbatim input received ▪ exact assembled prompt ▪ verbatim output produced ▪ verbatim input received ▪ exact assembled prompt ▪ verbatim output produced ▪ verbatim input received ▪ exact assembled prompt ▪ verbatim output produced verification guard — every output field must trace to an input; a date from nowhere is flagged as a hallucination, even when it happens to be right
What Cortex keeps at every handoff: the evidence, not a summary of it. Summaries are layered on top and never replace the verbatim record.

Key features

  • Lossless run records. Every agent and tool call is a traced node — chained by parent-run links into full workflows — with checkpoint I/O preserved verbatim at every step.
  • Field-level verification. A guard checks that every field in a step’s output traces back to something in its input. A date that appears from nowhere is flagged as a hallucination even if it happens to be right — the 0+1=2 failure (right answer, broken derivation) is treated as worse than a visible error.
  • Diagnosed escalation. When work blocks or climbs to a bigger model (the ladder’s rungs live with the fleet), the trace records why, in one of five diagnostic buckets (harness fault, model capability, task too big, needs decomposition, missing tool). Failure gets a taxonomy, not a shrug.
  • Plain-language explainability. A trace-summarizer turns any agent chain into one readable paragraph; every card in the interface answers “why am I seeing this?” in a tap; a board narrator compresses the fleet’s whole day into six plain lines.
  • Render honesty. Unmeasured values render as nothing — never as a default dressed up like a measurement. This came from a real bug (0% confidence stamped on everything) and became doctrine.
  • Observability of the builders, too. Even the chat between me and the system is mirrored as observation events — the same transparency applies to the humans-and-Claude layer that builds Witan as to Witan itself.

Highlights

  • Cortex is where the project’s hypothesis gets proven or falsified — “can Witan do X?” is answered by a trace showing every wire, prompt, and verified field, or by an honest diagnosis of why not and what would change that.
  • The verification guard’s premise — outputs must be derivable from inputs, not merely plausible — is the single idea from this project most transferable to any AI system.

Development log

July 8, 2026

Page created. Recent: the trace-summarizer and board narrator (plain-language layers over raw traces), the why-am-I-seeing-this explainer on every card, the render-honesty pass, and chat mirroring — every conversational turn with the system now emits an observation event like any other agent run.