Harness Engineering Part 8: Why Observability Is Essential for AI Agents

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Part 8 of the 10-part Harness Engineering series focuses on observability, the final component of a production-ready agentic system. Observability encompasses full-fidelity logs of model calls, traces of tool executions, latency and token metrics, and fixed evaluations to detect regressions. The author argues that without this instrumentation, engineers cannot determine what an agent did, why it failed, or whether it is improving over time. AI agents are particularly difficult to operate because they are non-deterministic, involve multiple steps, and can run for extended periods without direct supervision. The piece emphasizes that building an agent and being able to reliably operate one are fundamentally different achievements.

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Zenoh put/get race condition in Elixir causes stale reads 3.9% of the time

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Layer-by-Layer Network Troubleshooting: A Structured Approach to Fixing HTTPS Failures

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