← Field Notes · Perspective
Why agents should show their work
The gap between a demo that wows and an agent you'd put in front of a customer is legibility. Here's the case for traces.
Most agent demos are magic tricks. They work once, on stage, on a happy path. Then you put one in front of a real user and the magic curdles into a support ticket: why did it say that?
We built TRACE because that question deserves an answer you can read.
A trace is an argument
Every run produces a plan, a sequence of tool calls, and a verification pass. Read top to bottom, a trace is the agent’s argument for its own output, and arguments can be checked.
When the answer is wrong, you don’t guess at a prompt. You scroll to the step that failed.
Legibility is a feature, not a log
The instinct is to hide the machinery. That’s backwards. The teams shipping agents to production are the ones who made the machinery the product.