If your AI pipeline is running unattended, log the boring stuff now, not after it breaks

If you're building any kind of automated AI pipeline, log the boring stuff before you need it. What got excluded from a run and why. What changed between versions. What broke and how you actually fixed it, not just that it got fixed. You won't want to write it down after the fact. You'll wish you had it. Found this out the annoying way with mine. It ran fine for weeks, then something broke, and the actual fix lived in a decision I'd made and never written anywhere, not in the code, not in a doc, just in my head at the time. By the time it mattered again, I couldn't fully reconstruct why I'd made that call. Now I log the small exclusions and edge cases as I hit them, even when they feel too minor to bother with. Past-me is always a worse judge of what counts as boring than future-me turns out to be. Curious what other people building AI pipelines log by default now that they wish they'd started earlier.