I Thought Building Agent Observability Was a Detector Problem. I Was Wrong.
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Building agent observability tooling, directly addresses a key gap in AI agent systems.
Building agent observability requires instrumenting behavioral traces, not just adding detectors. After processing 100,000 real Hugging Face agent traces, the author found that 28 of 35 rule-based detectors never fired while the empty_response detector triggered on every trace — revealing that trace shape, not detector logic, was the core problem. The resulting open-source project, agent-exec-trace, ships three PyPI packages with 794 Python tests and uses OpenTelemetry-style spans for planning, tool calls, and cost, but the key lesson was that field testing with real traces must happen early enough to shape design assumptions.