Why Traces, Not Code, Are the New Source of Truth for AI Agents
If you’ve ever tried to “read the mind” of a GPT‑4‑powered assistant, you know the feeling: you stare at a few lines of orchestration code and wonder why the thing just suggested buying a pineapple pizza for a corporate finance report. The answer isn’t in the handle_submit() you wrote; it’s in a sequence of invisible decisions that only a trace can reveal. That’s the premise of a recent TL;DR note I skimmed on a commuter train, and it got me thinking about how the whole discipline of software engineering is quietly being rewired. In the old world, the codebase was the bible. In the new world of AI agents, the trace—the step‑by‑step log of what the model actually did—has taken that role. ...