Every run should leave a receipt

A workflow that runs an agent, then your tests, then a browser check, then waits for your approval is a small pipeline. Pipelines fail in interesting ways: a step times out, an output is malformed, a condition skips something you expected to run. When that happens a week later, you want to know exactly what happened — not reconstruct it from memory.

That is what a receipt is for.

#What belongs in a receipt

#The inputs

The brief, the version of the workflow, the trigger that started it — manual, interval or a new commit — and the commit it ran on.

#Every step, in order

For each step: what it received, what it produced, how long it took, how many tokens it used if it reported them, and whether it passed, failed, was skipped by a condition or was stopped.

#Evidence of change

Agent steps that may edit files should leave Git evidence: what the working tree looked like before and after the step. That turns “the agent updated the docs” into a list of files with line counts.

#The decisions

Approval steps record who approved and when — or that the run was rejected.

#An explanation when it fails

When a step fails, the receipt should say where and why in plain language, not just exit code 1.

#How PaneScale does it

Workflow runs in PaneScale keep all of the above automatically:

• a step log with inputs, outputs, durations and tokens,
• Git evidence for agent steps,
• a failure analysis that points at the step and the cause,
• an exportable receipt of the whole run.

Because every number comes from what PaneScale recorded, the receipt is the same whether the run succeeded or not, and whether anyone was watching.

#Use receipts to improve workflows

Receipts aren’t only for incidents. Every few weeks, look at the last ten runs of a workflow:

• Which step fails most often? Usually it needs a clearer instruction or a better check.
• Which step takes longest? Maybe it can run in a parallel group.
• Which outputs feed the next step badly? Ask for JSON and turn on the JSON check.

A workflow you can inspect is a workflow you can improve. See Workflows for the details.