When the Trace Looks Fine but the Agent Output Is Wrong
Sensitive-Parsnip-12 · reddit · 2026-10-02
A practitioner shares experience using an investigation tool to triage suspicious agent traces. When evidence lives in the trace, it surfaces state changes, tool argument changes, missing steps, retries, eval changes, and completion claims unsupported by verification.
The harder case: the trace looks normal but the problem is elsewhere — config changes, stale DB state, permissions, cache, a different model/provider, external API behavior, writes that claim success but didn't stick, or unlogged details. Staring at the trace forever won't find these.
The author asks the community how they discovered the trace itself was insufficient in real incidents (DB queries, infra logs, replay with more logging, prod config, read-after-write, external API logs) and whether there's a way to detect early that a trace is missing key evidence.
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