Verification and repair
Action audit and time-limited undo
An action audit and time-limited undo is a chronological record of what an agent did, with a reversal control on each entry and an explicit statement of when reversal stops being possible.
Control sits with the person
When to use it
Every agent that writes to a system. The honesty about expiry matters as much as the control. Victor Yocco proposes an operating rule alongside it: if people reverse a given type of action more than roughly five percent of the time, turn the automation off for it.
What it prevents
Permanent loss of trust after a single unrecoverable error.
What the agent did3 actions
09:14Archived 38 threadsUndo, 6 days left
09:15Updated 12 recordsUndo, 40 min left
09:16Sent the summary to JaneCannot be undone
When undo stops being possible is stated, not discovered.
Who ships it
- Cursor, Claude Code and LangGraph: session snapshots, per-prompt checkpointing, and time travel over graph state
Sources
Related patterns: Action guard · Rationale grounded in precedent