Successful Agent Retries Can Make Traces More Misleading, Not Less
Sensitive-Parsnip-12 · reddit · 2026-09-23
A developer building the agent trace-analysis tool Traser argues that traces ending in successful retries are harder to analyze than failures. The core problem: two similar tool calls with near-identical args don't prove a retry — it could be a different branch or a state change. Without correlation/attempt ids, idempotency keys, or matching row touches, similarity shouldn't be treated as identity, and admitting pairing uncertainty is better than trusting a 0.92 similarity score. A second tension: the first divergence (timestamps, request ids) is often useless, while the real cause may appear eight steps later — but ranking every difference turns the tool into a noise generator. Traser aims to surface only the few differences worth an engineer's attention, with uncertainty made explicit. The author is recruiting design partners running agents in prod (free).
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