“When we started working through agents, the one thing that we kind of lost visibility into was what happened between you and the code. Before, there was no distance. It was just you and your editor, and you would put it on GitHub and collaborate there. There was this whole in-between thing, a back and forth of you and the agent, that was just no longer being captured.”
sputnikintelligence.com
Asked what need led him to build Traces, Tarun describes the shift to agents as the main way code gets written. His team could still review pull requests but could no longer see how anyone was prompting the agent.
…It's been really interesting to like apply the learnings of one type of community in a completely different domain and also just see what is common across all of them. So, yeah, it's I've been very fortunate to have worked on some like really, really interesting problems in those kinds of spaces.
…previously that like Traces sort of spun out of the work that you were doing. Yeah. Previously, it's like you realized that y'all didn't have the tools you needed, you needed something else. What did you need? And what did you sort of like set out to accomplish when you were building Traces?
Yeah, so when we, I mean, you know, this, I think this is like the Opus 4.6 moment about a year ago today, now it's like October last year, when we really started to see that we were moving beyond the primary way of using AI and coding was for me that switch was moving beyond autocomplete into the agent entirely, right? Like was really around this time. And when that happened, when the agent became the sort of primary interface to how code was being generated, you know, we noticed that one of the key things that we used to do as a team, and we were a small team then, we're still a small team now, but we're a little bit bigger, but still, still a small team. What we used to do was we used to code, we used to write code and then collaborate on GitHub and talk about our things around pull requests, right? Like that's kind of how our workflow worked, just like everyone else, right? And we would provide input into each other's work in that way. And when we started working through agents, the one thing that we kind of lost visibility into was this like what happened between you and the code, right? Where before there was no distance, it was just you and…
Nice. That's awesome. So for. For our audience who may not have experienced your product yet, would you tell people a little bit more about just what is the experience that you're providing?
Yeah, yeah, that's great. So, we intentionally shaped traces to feel familiar, right? We want it to feel familiar. And the product that we often compare to is GitHub, right? So, when you join traces.com, you get a personal traces account. And you get traces.com/slash your name. So, you can grab…
Do you have users that like are default to public? Because, like, when I use GitHub, it's like I have one decision at one point in time. I want this repo to be public, and then all pushes therefore after are public. Like, I feel like it might be a little cumbersome to be like, okay, every single…