Hey everyone, I'm Ishaan the CEO of Amnara and today I'm going to be talking about the log is the agent. The basic idea of the talk is simple and that is most people think of an agent as the model or the execution environment that it's running in and I think that that's the wrong abstraction. I think that the thing that actually gives an agent its identity is its log and that's what I'm going to be arguing today. So think about a character you've spent a hundred hours playing in your favorite video game, in this case Skyrim. What exactly is your character? Is it the game engine? Is it the PlayStation? Is it the controller? No, it's not. Those things matter and those things are what will interact with and they'll run the character but none of those things are your character. Your character is data. It's the save file. And this is important because if your PlayStation bursts into flames, your character isn't gone. You can buy another PlayStation, you can download your save file from the cloud and you can resume exactly where they were and that's because the agent and its identity and history and its state is all captured in its data. The character lives in the data and this is the framing that I want to bring to agents. Today when people talk about agents, they usually point at the wrong thing. They'll say that the agent is the model or they'll say that it's the runtime and again as I mentioned earlier, those things matter but they're not the agent. The agent is its data. It's specifically the log. So what actually is the log? At the simplest level, the log is the append-only event history of the agent. It's every user input, every model output, every tool called, tool result, permission, failure and the idea is that every state transition that the agent takes is written to the log. This is important because it means that the identity of the agent isn't tied to the runtime or the model or the tools. Those things are all just interpreting and appending to the log. They're reading the log, acting on it, and writing the next event back. And that's important because then just using the log on its own is enough to resume the agent. Once you define the agent as a log, the rest of the system becomes a whole lot easier to reason about because every operation is either reading from or appending to the log. The model is reading from the log and then determining the next action. The tool runner is then executing that action and then it's appending that result. And this is all operating in a loop. Everything coordinates itself around the log. In practice, a simplified loop can look something like this. You can reconstruct the state from the log. You can pass that state to the model. The model can propose the next step and then append that response to the log. If the response asks for a tool, you can run that tool and also append that response to the log and then you can repeat. The important insight is not that this loop is complicated. The important insight is that the loop is disposable. A worker can claim the session, read the log, advance the agent one step, write the result, and then just completely disappear. And then that means that any other worker can pick it up later. This pattern should feel familiar. Databases had to learn this first. For years, databases looked like these non-transparent systems that were hard to reason about with tables and indexes and materialized views, but underneath every serious database is a log. And that log is the durable sequence of changes. Everything else is a view. I I agents need the same inversion. Today, agents are treated as again, these complicated systems that are opaque and they're filled with models and prompts and tool calls, but for the durable session, the log should be primary. The context that gets fed into the model is a projection of that log. The UI that gets rendered on top is a projection of that log. Debugging and traceability is a projection. Auditing is a projection. Compaction is also projection, which we'll talk about. But the log itself is not a projection. The log is the durable history that all of these projections can come from.