Observable by Default

Principle V: Observable by Default

If it isn’t observable, it doesn’t exist.

There is a particular kind of production incident that goes like this: something breaks, everyone scrambles, and the first thing anyone says is “do we have logs for that?” The answer, in systems built by optimists, is no. The answer, in Obsidian , is always yes.

The Blindness Tax

Lack of observability is not a missing feature. It is a liability. Every event that goes unrecorded is a future incident you cannot diagnose. Every metric you chose not to collect is a capacity problem you will discover in production, at scale, on a Friday afternoon.

The cost of storage is measurable and declining. The cost of blindness is immeasurable and compounding. This is not a close call.

What Observable Means

Observable does not mean “we have a dashboard.” Dashboards are the conclusion; observability is the premise. In Obsidian, every significant event in the task pipeline is logged with full context. Every agent decision is traceable. Every Warden intervention is recorded with the constitutional basis for the action.

This is not optional instrumentation you add when things get serious. It is an architectural requirement — baked into the system at the same level as type checking or memory safety. You would not ship Rust code without the borrow checker. You should not ship an orchestration system without complete observability.

Audit Trails Are Not Bureaucracy

In multi-agent systems, the question “why did that happen?” is not academic curiosity. It is the difference between a system you can trust and a system you merely hope is working. When an agent makes a decision, the reasoning is recorded. When the Warden mediates a dispute, the constitutional basis is logged. When a task fails, the full chain of causation is preserved.

This audit trail serves a dual purpose: operational debugging and constitutional compliance verification. You cannot enforce a Constitution you cannot audit.

Implications

Every component in Obsidian must emit structured events. Logging is not a cross-cutting concern to be addressed later — it is a core interface requirement. An agent that does not report its state is an agent that, from the system’s perspective, does not exist.

Relationship to Other Principles

Observability makes Survival by Design (Principle IV) possible — you cannot recover from what you cannot see. It enables Constitutional Consensus by providing the evidence base for compliance verification. And it is the mechanism by which Safety Through Boundaries (Principle XI) becomes auditable rather than aspirational.