Your gate signs a receipt for every action it lets through. That receipt is a record of one thing your agent did: what it was, which policy rule matched, and a signature anyone can check. It is positive proof. It says this action happened, on these terms, and has not changed since.

A receipt makes a narrow, strong claim, so it is worth being exact about its edges. The rest of this page is about what a receipt does prove and what it cannot.

What a receipt proves

What the action was. The verb, the tool, the target, and the arguments your agent passed, exactly as the gate saw them.
That it passed your policy. The receipt names the rule that matched and the decision it took, so you can see the action ran on the terms you set.
That nothing changed afterward. The receipt is signed. Edit any signed field and the signature stops verifying, so a tampered receipt is caught, never silently accepted.
Who stands behind it. The operator key, and a human approver too when the action was held and co-signed. See Verify for how that is checked.

Positive proof, not an accusation

A receipt is something your agent produced. It is evidence that an action happened the way it says. It is never a claim about an action that has no receipt. Absence of a receipt is silence, not an accusation.

What a receipt cannot prove

Verifying a receipt confirms it is intact and signed by the key you trust. It does not reach past that:

It does not prove the action was a good idea, only that it ran under your policy.
It does not prove the outside system carried the action out. The receipt is your signed claim, not the provider’s confirmation.
It cannot speak to anything that never went through the gate. If a call leaves on a path the gate is not installed on, there is no receipt for it, and heso does not pretend otherwise.

The gate is the boundary of the proof

heso proves what the agent did inside the gate. It cannot prove anything that never went through the gate. Going around is allowed. It just produces nothing you can use.

Why this matters

The value of a proof is that it is honest about its own scope. A receipt you can hand to anyone, that they can check offline, is worth more than a claim that quietly overreaches. heso keeps the claim narrow on purpose: every receipt proves exactly one action, and nothing it cannot stand behind.

To make the proof complete, install the gate on every path that matters. The more of your agent’s actions flow through the gate, the more of what it did you can prove.

Receipts

What a receipt holds, field by field, and how it is signed.

Verify

Check a receipt offline, from the bytes alone, with no account.

Limits

heso proves what the agent did inside the gate. It cannot prove anything that never went through the gate. A receipt covers one action and the terms it ran on. It does not confirm the provider’s own outcome, and it says nothing about actions that produced no receipt.