What is the minimum record you'd keep for every production agent action?

Keeping every prompt, retrieved document, tool response, database snapshot and provider payload forever sounds absurd.

It's expensive, it creates a privacy mess, and it turns the history itself into something sensitive.

Keeping only a trace ID and final status seems like the opposite mistake. That's how you end up unable to answer the one disputed action six months later.

The middle ground I've seen is a small evidence envelope for every important action: policy version, target, exact request hash, the few facts the decision depended on, provider ID/result, and the resulting state change. Full payloads only where risk and retention rules allow it.

If you had to choose the smallest record you could still defend later, what is non-negotiable?

And what would you refuse to store even if it made investigations easier?