Agent Trace RFC
Agent Trace is a new open specification aimed at tracking AI-generated code contributions alongside human authorship. It establishes a vendor-neutral format for recording attribution data in version-controlled codebases. The specification focuses on interoperability, granularity, and extensibility while not addressing code ownership or quality assessment.
- ▪Agent Trace defines a standard for recording AI contributions in code.
- ▪The specification allows for detailed attribution at file and line levels.
- ▪It is designed to be human-readable and does not require specific interfaces.
Lobsters files mainly under programming. We currently carry 187 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Agent-trace |
| Canonical URL | https://agent-trace.dev/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 18:30:23 -0500 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T23:37:55.197Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T23:37:55.197Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TW4a17hvMAU3 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Agent Trace Version: 0.1.0 Status: RFC Date: January 2026 Abstract Agent Trace is an open specification for tracking AI-generated code. It provides a vendor-neutral format for recording AI contributions alongside human authorship in version-controlled codebases. Table of Contents Motivation Goals Non-Goals Terminology Architecture Overview Core Specification Extensibility Reference Implementation Appendix 1. Motivation As agents write more code, it's important to understand what came from AI versus humans. This attribution is both the models used as well as the related agent conversations. Agent Trace defines an open, interoperable standard for recording this attribution data. 2. Goals Interoperability: Any compliant tool can read and write attribution data.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Agent-trace.
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