# Observability Seeing what an agent did, and why, after the fact: logs, activity feeds, and the difference between a summary and a receipt. Source: https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/observability/ Topic Trust a fleet of agents by watching what they did, not by hoping it went well. Observability is the record of what each agent actually did: which files it touched, which commands it ran, and why it made the call it made. For a lone developer this is a diff. For a fleet of agents running unattended, it is the only way to answer "what happened here" hours or days later. This matters most when something goes wrong. A vague summary from the agent is not enough. You need the command it ran, the file it read before it decided, and the moment a task changed state. CodeHerder keeps that trail, so a review or an incident never starts from a blank screen. This hub covers what we log, and what we chose not to. It also covers the debugging sessions where the activity feed turned a guess into a five-minute fix. [Request access →](https://codeherder.com/get-started/#request-access) September 12, 2026 · 8 min read ## [We asked our agents what slowed them down](https://codeherder.com/blog/we-asked-our-agents-what-slowed-them-down/) Our first Agent Experience survey put five questions to every code-stage agent for a day. 84 of 85 answered. Here is how it works and what the herd told us. For everyone - [observability](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/observability/) - [workflow](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/workflow/) - [orchestration](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/orchestration/) August 16, 2026 · 8 min read ## [Optimise the file every agent reads before doing anything](https://codeherder.com/blog/the-file-every-agent-reads/) Keeping CLAUDE.md small is best practice, but ours hit 231KB across 37 correct commits. Splitting it cut cost per turn 28%, turns per task by a third. For everyone - [workflow](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/workflow/) - [cost](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/cost/) - [observability](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/observability/) August 5, 2026 · 8 min read ## [The most expensive line in your agent config is the model name](https://codeherder.com/blog/reasoning-model-is-the-cost-lever/) Agent cost doesn't track codebase size. Swapping our judgment stage's reasoning model moved a story's cost 2.4x, and its lead time nearly 3x. For everyone - [cost](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/cost/) - [orchestration](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/orchestration/) - [observability](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/observability/) July 26, 2026 · 14 min read ## [Anatomy of an $8 feature: the itemised receipt for code no human wrote](https://codeherder.com/blog/anatomy-of-an-8-dollar-feature/) 944 user stories shipped in a week, with no human writing the code. Here's what the median one cost, and what each quality gate caught. For everyone - [cost](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/cost/) - [workflow](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/workflow/) - [quality](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/quality/) - [observability](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/observability/) July 25, 2026 · 14 min read ## [10 things we learned running 100 billion tokens through a herd of AI agents](https://codeherder.com/blog/100-billion-tokens/) Two months of CodeHerder data: 1.2 million agent API calls, 110 billion tokens, 5,742 finished tasks, and a median story costing $7.54, done in 50 minutes. For everyone - [cost](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/cost/) - [observability](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/observability/) - [orchestration](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/orchestration/) June 1, 2026 · 3 min read ## [Cost-aware AI engineering: keeping agent spend visible and bounded](https://codeherder.com/blog/cost-aware-ai-engineering/) Token spend is easy to lose track of with more than one agent running. Here's how to keep it visible per task, agent, and model. For everyone - [cost](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/cost/) - [observability](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/observability/) - [quality](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/quality/) [← All topics](https://codeherder.com/blog/topics/) [All insights](https://codeherder.com/blog/)