AgentTrace — Developer Control Plane for AI

The Problem AI coding agents like IBM Bob have crushed the cost of writing code to near-zero. A single agent prompt can refactor dozens of files, introduce new abstractions, and alter core architectures in seconds. This triggers the Jevons Paradox of Software: as code generation becomes effortless, code volume explodes by orders of magnitude. Yet our code review infrastructure remains trapped in 2005. When an agent touches 75 files, the engineer receives a flat Git diff: lines inserted in green, lines deleted in red. Git diffs were built for human patches where intent lives in the engineer’s head. They are blind to: Agent Intent & Trials: Why did the agent choose this abstraction? What 5 failed iterations did it attempt and discard before settling on this diff? Hidden Semantic Blast Radius: A one-line method signature change in a utility file can silently break 15 callers across 6 downstream services—invisible in a file diff. Developer Skill Atrophy: When engineers are reduced to rubber-stamping massive agent PRs without understanding them, their mental models collapse and software engineering skills atrophy. The Solution: AgentTrace AgentTrace is the developer control plane and governance layer for AI coding agents. It transforms opaque agent transcripts and raw diffs into actionable, semantically grounded intelligence: Causal Reasoning Graph: Reconstructs the agent's exact decision journey. It maps raw tool calls, command outputs, and exploratory dead-ends directly to the resulting commit hunks, exposing why every line was written. Semantic Blast Radius Engine: Replaces dumb line diffs with Language Server Protocol (LSP) and AST-powered impact analysis. A real-time dependency graph highlights modified nodes (Red), direct callers (Orange), and ripple-effect blast radius (Purple) across the entire codebase. Production Readiness Gating: An automated CI/CD risk engine scores sessions from 0 to 100 based on 7 critical heuristics (breaking changes, omission risks, untracked dependencies, missing tests, and security boundaries), giving teams instant review-or-merge confidence. Interactive Learning Hub: Solves skill atrophy by automatically extracting the architectural concepts, patterns, and trade-offs the agent applied, turning every agent execution into an interactive masterclass for the developer. Target Users & Interaction AgentTrace is designed for software engineers, tech leads, and enterprise platform teams deploying autonomous agents. Developers interact with AgentTrace either through a zero-friction CLI (agent-trace inspect), an automated CI/CD GitHub PR check that posts readiness scorecards and blast radius graphs, or a local interactive dashboard. What Makes It Creative & Unique AgentTrace features a profound meta-narrative: it was built end-to-end by an orchestrated team of IBM Bob 2.0 sub-agents (Architect, Lead, Dev, Tester), and it is designed to supervise and govern Bob's own telemetry. It replaces blind trust with grounded observability, ensuring human engineers retain architectural mastery in the age of autonomous AI.