Sep 202615 min read ## Putting the trace before the loop - #ai - #agents - #observability - #architecture An 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…