INSTRUMENT | Reliability testing
Irreversible Action Inventory: What Your Agent Cannot Take Back
2 cited sources
List every action your agent can take, mark what reverses it, and name the point of no return. A written verdict per row, never a score or a budget.
Some of your agent's actions can be taken back. Some cannot, which is why our production-reliability research and OWASP's own security guidance both treat the second kind separately: prevention is the only control left. List every action; this sheet sorts each into compensable, windowed, manual, or irreversible.
You leave with a plain verdict per row, a named point of no return, and a gap list: never a score, a budget, or a ruling on whether an action may run.
Showing your last valid result. Update the inputs above to recompute.
No action has a name yet, so there is nothing to place on a pivot and nothing to export. Type an action into the first row to begin.
Markdown is the document for a design review. JSON is the same document and loads back into this form.
Reads M-D03's action-risk-matrix export. Only action, what it changes, and the reversal facts a seeded row carries; owner never carries across. Nothing is uploaded.
JSON. Drag one here, or use the box below.
Check this value.
The JSON this page exports, and only that. Read in this browser: nothing is uploaded, and nothing here is stored between visits.
JSON. Drag one here, or use the box below.
Check this value.
How the verdict is decided
No arithmetic. Each row's verdict is a reversal sentence, first match wins across compensable, windowed, manual, irreversible, read-only, or incomplete, joined to a retry sentence: safe, not safe, or not recorded either way. No verdict says whether the call may run, who approves it, or what to log.
The point of no return is the lowest-numbered irreversible row.
A windowed row is never the pivot: it stays reversible while
its window is open, and a step number alone cannot say whether that window
is still open by the time a later step runs. Windowed rows, and any
reversible row nobody owns, show up separately as rows that expire on a
clock or a person this sheet cannot see.
What this worksheet will not give you
No budget, no score, no index, and no answer on which actions need a human approver. Those are control decisions, and a control decision needs a second axis, blast radius, that this page never collects. The paired risk matrix collects it and turns it into a control level; this page stays a plain inventory of what reverses and what does not.
Questions
What counts as a side effect?
Anything that changes state outside the agent's own reasoning: a write to
a database, a message sent, a file deleted, a call to a paid API. A read,
a search, or a draft the agent never sends is read-only and
has nothing to reverse.
Why is sending an email irreversible once its window closes, even though I can delete it from my own outbox?
Deleting your own copy does not unsend it. A windowed row is
reversible only while its cancellation window is open; once it closes,
the message exists on someone else's server and nothing this agent does
brings it back. That is a windowed row expiring, not a
pivot. The point of no return only ever names an irreversible
row.
What do I write when nothing reverses an action?
Set Reversal to irreversible and leave
Compensation empty. The export prints
none exists there, a different fact from a cell you simply
never answered, which prints NOT RECORDED. Typing a
compensation anyway is kept, not cleared, and the gap list flags the
contradiction. A
graceful, partial recovery
is not the same claim as full reversal.
Why is retry safety a separate column from reversibility?
They answer different questions. Reversibility asks whether a call, once it succeeds, can be undone. Retry safety asks whether calling it again changes anything more. A compensable action can still be unsafe to repeat, and an irreversible one can still be safe to retry if it happens to be idempotent. The two facts do not imply each other.
Why will this page not tell me which actions need a human approver?
That call needs blast radius (how far an effect reaches), which this worksheet never asks for. The paired action risk matrix collects reversibility alongside blast radius and turns the pair into a written control level. This page stops at the reversal facts.