Commitment Tracking
Extract the agent's stated intents into a ledger with open/followed-through/expired status — make the gap between promise and follow-through visible before it erodes trust.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
Turn the agent’s in-turn promises into trackable, auditable commitments.
📋 Context
Your conversational agent routinely says things like “let me pull the latest figures” or “I’ll come back to this once the build finishes” — and then the moment passes. Without external tracking, the agent has no signal that it promised something and no way to notice when the promise expired.
💡 Solution
After each agent turn, run a cheap-tier extraction pass that scans for stated intents and writes each as a Commitment record into an append-only ledger. Each record: intent statement, turn raised, optional deadline or condition, status (open). Two moves: mark_followed_through(id, evidence) flips status when the action happened; mark_expired(id) closes overdue records. Run check_expirations periodically. Surface open commitments in the agent’s working context.
Real-world Use Case
- The agent makes frequent in-turn promises the user expects to be honoured.
- A cheap-tier model is available for the extraction pass.
- Follow-through gaps have been observed and are eroding user trust.
Source
📌 TL;DR
Every promise gets logged. Every log entry gets a status. Expired = auto-flagged. The agent can’t quietly drop what it said it would do.
Advantages
- The gap between stated intent and action becomes auditable, not invisible.
- Cheap-tier extraction avoids loading the main model with bookkeeping.
- Periodic expiration sweeps keep the ledger bounded and surface drift automatically.
Disadvantages
- Extraction noise: figurative or rhetorical intents may get logged as real commitments.
- An overzealous ledger makes the agent feel chased by its own off-hand remarks.
- Mark-followed-through depends on the agent’s self-reporting; pair with external verification for high-stakes commitments.