Start with a small, testable question
Imagine a release assistant produces a neat dependency-update summary. Before asking whether its conclusion is right, ask a narrower question: what happened when it looked up the dependency? That question can be answered against observed events. It does not require treating the assistant’s explanation as an account of everything it did.
In our fictional explorer, the first lookup times out. A second attempt succeeds, an operator approves the update, and the agent drafts a summary. The draft alone would not expose the failed dependency call or the time spent waiting for approval.
Read transitions, not isolated statuses
A “completed” label compresses a process into a word. For a useful review, connect the failed lookup to the retry and the retry to the next decision. Keep the two attempts separate. Otherwise a reliability investigation can miss a pattern of first-attempt failures hidden behind eventual success.
The same principle applies to handoffs. A request sent to another agent does not establish that the work was accepted or completed. Look for an observed return event and the relationship that links it to the request. If the capture integration never saw the return, record the uncertainty.
Treat time as context
Our example contains 115 seconds of elapsed time: 70 seconds of sequential activity and 45 seconds of waiting for a person. Those figures explain different parts of the workflow. Reducing human wait time calls for a process change; reducing lookup latency calls for a different investigation.
Real executions may include parallel work. Summing the duration of overlapping steps can exceed elapsed time. A review should state how each measure is computed before comparing agents or promising an improvement.
Finish with what remains unanswered
The sample does not include real code, token counts, monetary cost, or a correctness assessment of the dependency choice. Those omissions are part of the review, not defects to hide with default values. A zero-dollar cost would suggest measurement; an unknown cost tells the truth.
A good next step is to identify the additional evidence required for the actual decision. That might be a test result, an operator’s authorization policy, or a signed release artifact. An execution record helps locate the question. It does not automatically settle it.