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Detailed traces are necessary for debugging agents
Detailed traces are necessary for debugging agents
Chase says message trajectories alone are insufficient for complete debugging and advocates detailed traces that expose tool calls, context accumulation, execution steps, and model interactions.
- Speaker
- Harrison Chase
- Topic
- Agent Observability
- Source timestamp
- 13:43
More from this interview
- Agents combine a harness, model, and context
- A harness brings context to the model when needed
- Most agents share a simple model-and-tools loop
- Middleware can customize the core agent loop
- Start general and specialize as requirements become clearer
- Out-of-distribution tasks require more harness customization
- Custom harnesses should preserve model-native tool patterns
- Mission-critical agents should have task-specific benchmarks
- Agent benchmarks should measure more than accuracy
- Poor context often causes agent failures
- Production traces can drive continuous agent improvement
- Agent UX can generate useful implicit feedback
- Trace data can improve every major agent component
- Agent improvement can be partially automated from traces
- Benchmark comparisons can reveal techniques worth adopting
- Harness customization exists on a spectrum
- Predictability can justify more controlled agent architectures