Step Logging
Recording each thing an agent does as it does it, so there’s a paper trail of the whole run.
Think of it like
A ship’s logbook — each event written down as it happens, not reconstructed later from memory.
Example
Every time the agent picks a tool, the log captures which one, with what arguments, and what came back.
How it actually works
Step logging is the low-level habit that makes observability possible: write down each action, thought, and result at the moment it occurs. Without it, a failed run is a black box. The tension is verbosity versus signal — log too little and you can’t debug, log everything and you drown in noise and storage cost. Structured logs that you can query beat walls of raw text.
For product teams
Cheap discipline now, huge payoff later — you can only debug what you bothered to log.
For engineers
Emit a structured record per agent action (thought, tool call, result) as it executes, feeding traces.
Related
- Trace — What step logs roll up into.
- Agent Observability — The discipline they support.
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