# Requirement change

A retry loop somewhere in the fleet started logging the same line, at the same level, several
thousand times a minute while it waited for a dependency to come back. It didn't crash anything,
but it drowned every other message on every destination we have — console, file, the works — for
twenty minutes before anyone noticed the real problem underneath it.

**Consecutive, identical log calls should collapse into one.** Concretely:

- If a call to log something is at the <i>same level</i> and has the <i>exact same message</i>
  as the call immediately before it, it should be silently dropped — it does not reach any
  destination at all, not even the ones that would otherwise have wanted it.
- The moment either the level or the message changes, the run is over. The new, different call
  is written normally, and it becomes the new thing later duplicates get compared against.
- This applies before anything gets to a destination — it is not each destination's job to
  notice it is seeing the same thing repeatedly; the collapsing happens once, centrally, so every
  destination agrees about what actually happened.
- Nothing else changes. Two calls that are not both the same level AND the same message are two
  separate records, exactly as they are today.
