A 5-step loop for debugging AI agents in production: trace everything, watch for silent failures
Tracify · reddit · 2026-10-20
A developer shares the observability loop he settled on after painful production debugging of AI agents:
- Frame: name the user task and define what a good outcome looks like
- Follow: connect every model call, tool call and retry into one trace per run
- Assess: compare quality, cost and latency — not just "did it finish"
- Respond: route each failure to an owner with a safe first action
- Learn: turn every failure into a test or an alert
His biggest lesson: silent failures (wrong answers with no error) and cost spikes from retry loops were far more common than crashes — and the things he most wished he had recorded earlier.
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