# Inspect and operate

One treats explanation and evidence as product capabilities, not debug output.
Every meaningful record can be resolved through its semantic owner and exact
revision.

## Inspect an exact subject

```console
one inspect active
one inspect health
one inspect logs
one inspect plan:revision:sha256:… --format json
```

The developer interface keeps the subject opaque and dispatches it to the
selected owner adapter. The owner resolves the complete record and returns a
versioned envelope containing its kind, stage, schema, provenance, and
disposition.

Inspection can answer questions such as:

- Why is this dependency, permission, route, artifact, or resource present?
- Which source and policy required it?
- Which provider was selected, and why were alternatives rejected?
- Which artifact, Build report, plan, approval, grant, and binding are active?
- Which actions completed, which are pending, and which outcomes are unknown?
- Which observations prove the postconditions, and how fresh are they?
- What changed between two revisions, and what would remove this inclusion?

An unresolved reference, stale evidence, unsupported subject, or missing proof
is a typed result. The interface never manufactures values from a digest or
decodes owner-private records as though it owned their meaning.

## Observe with one semantic envelope

Logs, metrics, traces, profiles, audits, lineage, and cost signals share an
observation envelope with identity, time, causality, provenance,
classification, subject, schema, and retention. Physical backends remain
replaceable views.

Cardinality, sampling, redaction, privacy, clock uncertainty, and overhead
budgets are part of the contract. A dashboard cannot silently broaden data
collection, and an exporter cannot erase the source or trust level of a
signal.

## Record causal history

History owns immutable facts and causal edges: accepted intent, planning and
Build decisions, approvals, dispatch, acknowledgement, observation,
reconciliation, compensation, and assurance evidence.

Materialized current state is a view over those facts. Replay declares its
limits: pure computation may be recomputed, deterministic workflows may be
replayed from exact histories, observations may be reprojected, but an
external effect is never executed again merely to recreate the past.

## Recover forward

Rollback means a new governed transition toward a previous desired state. It
may require a new artifact, migration, authority, rollout, and compensation.
Irreversible or externally visible effects remain explicit in history.

When an outcome is unknown, One quarantines unsafe progress, queries the
provider where possible, imports authenticated observations, and reconciles
under the original fence. Human intervention and break-glass actions use the
same identity, approval, scope, expiry, and evidence model.

## Operate through contracts

Automation, operators, dashboards, and AI agents consume the same versioned
inspection and operation contracts as people. Machine access begins within an
explicit workspace and authority boundary. Untrusted content cannot create a
new tool, widen a grant, bypass an approval, or convert a suggestion into an
effect.

Follow [Ship and inspect a release](/one/examples/release) and
[Correlate observations and causal history](/one/examples/observability-history).

Canonical owners:
[Observability](https://github.com/muijf/one/blob/main/systems/observability/AGENTS.md),
[History](https://github.com/muijf/one/blob/main/systems/history/AGENTS.md), and
[Developer Interface](https://github.com/muijf/one/blob/main/systems/developer-interface/AGENTS.md).