Auditing what an agent actually did

the diff says what changed; the transcript says what was tried

You want to review agent changes from a week ago: what was touched, and why. Or a build broke and the last person to touch it was a session, not a person. Or a review asks a question the diff cannot answer: what else did it try first.

The transcript records more than the conversation

What the harness writes is not only the words. Each turn carries the files it opened, the commands it ran and what they exited with, and the exact text an edit replaced. That is the part every summary throws away and the part an audit needs — a summary can tell you it "fixed the pool exhaustion"; only the record tells you which file, which command, and what the code said before.

Asking about a file

deja blame internal/index/ingest.go

The sessions that discussed or changed it, newest first, each with the project, the agent and the line that settled something. Session history rather than git authorship: it answers why for changes that a commit message reduced to "fix ingest", and it covers work that never became a commit at all.

The reverse question is deja files <topic> — which files the work on a topic actually touched — and it answers plainly when nothing matched rather than inventing a list:

$ deja files "zed extension licence"
0 sessions mention "zed extension licence", none of them recorded a file near it

Asking what the agent was told

An audit of the agent is incomplete without an audit of what it was handed. deja log lists every recall and injection — when, which kind, how much, and how many sessions it drew on:

$ deja log
2026-08-24 12:11  dejavu   895 B · 2 sessions
2026-08-24 10:50  hook     2.2 KB · 3 sessions

deja log --last prints the exact digest most recently served, so "what did it actually see" is a question with an answer rather than an inference. Where a trust policy is in force, the receipt names the rule that allowed the injection.

What this is not

It is not a compliance trail. The records are whatever the harness wrote and whatever survived redaction — nothing here proves an agent did not do something, and a harness that logs sparsely leaves gaps that no index can fill. The format registry documents, per harness, what is recorded and what deja could not verify, including the gaps.

It is also not free of judgement: recall ranks, and ranking can be wrong. For an audit, read the session — deja show <id> and deja resume <id> open the real thing rather than a digest of it.

Where the transcripts live · What is indexed and what is stripped · CLI reference