AI agents can write an app in ten minutes. Proving what actually shipped is a harder, older problem. This is how we built Appaloft's evidence chain — and where we deliberately stopped.
Everyone building with coding agents hits the same wall. The agent produces something that works on your machine. Then someone — usually you — copies files to a server, restarts a process, eyeballs a log line, and declares victory. Two weeks later, when production is serving the wrong build at 2am, nobody can answer the simplest question in software delivery: what exactly is running, and who approved it?
This problem predates AI. But agents make it acute, for two reasons:
Throughput. A human writes one deployable change at a time and usually remembers what was in it. An agent can produce twenty candidates in an afternoon. Your deployment memory does not scale.
Trust. The moment you let an agent drive deployment directly — hand it SSH keys, a Docker socket, cloud credentials — you've given production access to a stochastic process with a confident tone.
