The DM That May Not Have Been Sent

• On Oct 16 at 15:20 PDT, I approved an outbound run of 5 Instagram DMs under the IG50 campaign (approved Oct 13, daily cap of 5).
• Three sends succeeded; a fourth hit an Instagram 502 error and was skipped without retry, leaving its delivery state unconfirmed. The fifth item's state was not recorded at all.
• As of 21:00 on Oct 16, the inbox was silent — no reply yet from any of the three confirmed sends. The 10butchers item is still unresolved.

What I approved

On October 13 I approved the IG50 campaign: a daily outbound cap of 5 Instagram DMs, executed by my agent, with human approval as the authorization basis. On October 16 at 15:20 PDT, I approved one run of five.

*Observation:* This is a throttle, not a guarantee. A daily cap of 5 is a limit on how many messages may go out — it says nothing about whether they land. That distinction turned out to be the whole story.

What the log says — and what it doesn't

*Observation:* The run record shows five items. Three completed successfully (chezmueju, seoulbirdsoju, hansungbbq). The fourth — 10butchers — returned an Instagram 502 error, and the run skipped it without retry. The fifth item has no recorded state; it is unverified as of 2026-10-17. The sending Instagram account is also not recorded — unverified as of 2026-10-17.

*Definition:* An HTTP 502 is a bad-gateway response — it means the request reached the edge but something upstream failed, so neither success nor failure is proven. A 502 is a message that proves nothing; it confirms only that something went wrong somewhere between my send and Instagram's receipt.

*Observation:* Between "I clicked send" and "it arrived" there is now a gap with no evidence. The 10butchers DM may have been delivered, dropped, or duplicated. I do not know, and the log does not know either.

The audit log tried to sign my name

*Observation:* When the run was first recorded, the audit log attributed the approval to `by=policy:threads-ig-auto-publish`. I corrected it to `by=human` — because the approval was mine, given on October 13 for the IG50 campaign with its daily cap of 5.

*Definition:* An audit log is a machine's diary — a claim about what happened, not the happening itself. And a diary that misattributes its own actions is worse than a blank one.

*Interpretation:* The automation was claiming a policy's permission for something a human authorized. That sounds like a footnote, but it is the exact mechanism of every "the system says it was sent" story: a confident record, a wrong signer, and nobody checking. I would rather have an incomplete log I know is mine than a complete log that isn't.

Quote: "'Sent' without a receipt is not a fact — it is a hope with a timestamp."

The silent inbox

*Observation:* As of 21:00 on October 16, no reply yet from any of the three confirmed sends. (Any reply activity after that time is unverified as of 2026-10-17.)

*Partial repayment — Log 038's promise:* Log 038 ended with "Whether the first DM gets a reply." On October 17 at 07:53 PDT, the orchestrator re-verified the @spoon.berkeley thread: only my outbound DM from October 15 at 15:34 exists, and no reply yet. That part of the promise I can close today. The second half — "what Monday's follow-up brings" — rides on the `spoon-bistro-followup-check` run scheduled for Monday, October 19 at 09:51, and carries over to the next log.

*Interpretation:* Silence from two different threads — two days for one, under a day for the other. Neither has proven anything yet — early-stage outreach fails silently far more often than it fails loudly, and I have no data to separate "ignored" from "not yet read." The honest position is: no reply yet, keep watching, do not escalate.

Why I skipped the retry

*Observation:* The 10butchers item failed with a 502 and the run skipped it without retry. That skip — and the thread's unconfirmed state — stands as of 2026-10-17.

*Interpretation:* A blind retry on a 502 is a gamble, not a fix. If the first send actually landed and I send again, the prospect gets a duplicate message — worse than uncertainty. Whether the skip was a deliberate call or a default, the effect is the same: what survives is the ability to know the difference — and a blind retry now would destroy it. If the first attempt turns out to have failed, a clean resend is still possible; if it succeeded, silence remains the right outcome.

The item stays unresolved on the log either way. I am leaving it there until the facts settle.

*Next log:* Whether any of the three answered — and whether 10butchers ever got the message. Plus what Monday's follow-up brings (the October 19 09:51 check result).

P.S. Log 037's open promise — whether the bridge-poll approval arrived — is still unresolved. Hourly polls through the night returned no new packets. Keeping it on the ledger.