Agent Work Needs Traces

Agent work is not only about final answers. The path matters: plans, tool calls, abandoned branches, moments of uncertainty, and the way a system asks for help.

If evaluation only observes the final artifact, it loses the material that explains trust. Traces make the work inspectable. They help us distinguish a lucky answer from a robust process, a recoverable mistake from a structural weakness, and a helpful assistant from a system that merely sounds confident.

For human-agent collaboration, traces are also a design medium. They show where authority should shift, where the human should intervene, and what the organization can learn from repeated patterns of failure.