Debate trace
A record of the structured deliberation between the critic and planner agents during the evaluation phase of the cognitive loop. Captures disagreements, risk flags, confidence margins, and the final arbitration decision. Used by the reflection loop to attribute reasoning failures to specific deliberation steps.
When the critic agent evaluates the planner's proposal, the exchange produces a debate trace - a structured record of what each agent claimed, where they disagreed, what risks were flagged, and how the disagreement was resolved by the arbitration scoring function. This trace is distinct from activity traces, which record each agent's individual outputs; the debate trace records the interaction between agents. The reflection loop reads debate traces alongside outcome records to identify patterns: a critic that consistently flags risks that the planner then overrides and the subsequent actions fail suggests arbitration weights should penalize risk-flagged proposals more heavily. Without debate traces, the arbitration process is a black box; with them, it becomes an auditable and improvable component of the cognitive architecture.