Record What the Agent Did Before Asking a Model to Summarize It

A handoff system separated deterministic event recording from optional narrative summaries.

Core Finding:A session summary can help explain work, but it should not be the only record that work happened. We examined a handoff system that stored structured session state and git events through deterministic code, then offered an optional model summary. Its demonstration showed a large latency difference between raw retrieval and summarization, with important differences in what each output provided.

Empirical Findings Table

The report records a 30-day git-event backfill with 5,445 rows across approximately 30 repositories, completed in 1.6 seconds. This was a bulk import of existing event history. It is not a measurement of sustained ingest under concurrent live load.

Telemetry Metric	Measured Value	Context & Observability

Engineering Action Directives

An agent's activity record and an explanation of its activity serve different purposes. Event recording can answer whether a repository action was observed. A narrative can explain why it mattered and how it relates to unfinished work. Combining them at the point of capture makes both harder to inspect.
For AI-built software, deterministic telemetry offers a useful check on fluent self-report. An agent may say it shipped a change when it only created a local commit. A recorded event history can help a later reviewer distinguish those states, provided the recording semantics are clear. A push attempt still needs interpretation before it becomes evidence that a remote accepted the change.
The system therefore suggests a layered status workflow: capture observable facts, retrieve them directly when that answers the question, and summarize when interpretation adds value. The model becomes a reader of the record rather than the sole creator of the record.
This does not make the record complete. Intent, unresolved decisions, and reasons for abandoning an approach are not fully represented by repository events. Structured handoffs remain useful for those facts, and the eventual answer still needs source checking. The improvement is a more inspectable division of labor, not an automatic guarantee of accurate memory.

Methodology Boundaries & Limits

The latency figures are a demonstration with different query and output forms, not repeated measurements of equivalent answers. No general speedup ratio is claimed.
Detached launch latency excludes background completion and durability. The report does not provide a distribution of end-to-end ingestion delays.
Remote push reconciliation was explicitly untested against a real remote in this report. Event capture alone cannot certify successful delivery.
Structured handoff content is authored and can be wrong or incomplete. Deterministic parsing preserves a statement; it does not verify the statement's truth.