Putting the trace before the loop: observability-first AI agent design
← All articlesSep 202615 min readPutting the trace before the loop#ai#agents#observability#architectureAn observability-first approach for building an AI agent, and what it bought me. A couple of weeks ago I started implementing Kept, a self-hostable post-purchase support agent for e-commerce, with reliability as its core offering. Besides the product itself, my objective in building it is to delve into the depths of agentic system design, and see what it actually means to build an agent with "reliability at its core".
- ▪← All articlesSep 202615 min readPutting the trace before the loop#ai#agents#observability#architectureAn observability-first approach for building an AI agent, and what it bought me.
- ▪A couple of weeks ago I started implementing Kept, a self-hostable post-purchase support agent for e-commerce, with reliability as its core offering.
- ▪Besides the product itself, my objective in building it is to delve into the depths of agentic system design, and see what it actually means to build an agent with "reliability at its core".
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| Original publisher | Dragos Bilaniuc |
| Canonical URL | https://dbln.me/blog/building-an-ai-agent-observability-first |
| Publication time | Mon, 28 Sep 2026 05:39:36 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-28T05:56:07.110Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-28T05:56:07.110Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zBqt4Xpr3nG2 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
← All articlesSep 202615 min readPutting the trace before the loop#ai#agents#observability#architectureAn observability-first approach for building an AI agent, and what it bought me. A couple of weeks ago I started implementing Kept, a self-hostable post-purchase support agent for e-commerce, with reliability as its core offering. Besides the product itself, my objective in building it is to delve into the depths of agentic system design, and see what it actually means to build an agent with "reliability at its core". Observability first I started from a theory my experience validated again and again throughout the years: observability is the bedrock of reliability. Proper logs and metrics beat an ideal architecture, industry-leading frameworks or best coding patterns.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Dragos Bilaniuc.
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