You let an AI agent edit your repo, run commands, call tools. The next morning someone asks: what did it actually do? And you realize the only honest answer you have is "trust me."
That answer does not survive contact with a client, a security reviewer, or an auditor. I got tired of it, so I built a tool that produces an answer a skeptic can check on their own machine. This is a walkthrough of how it works, with commands you can run in about two minutes.
The tool is soma, an open-source (Apache-2.0) runtime. But the interesting part is not the tool, it is the four ideas it stitches together. You could rebuild any of them yourself; the point of this post is the pattern.
The problem, stated precisely
Every big vendor shipped agent governance this year (Microsoft Agent 365, OpenAI Frontier, Google's agent platform). They are good at managing fleets. But the audit trail they produce lives inside the vendor's cloud. To believe the log, you have to believe the cloud that produced it.
