“There's actually nothing in Traces data that companies don't already have, all the way from your Slack history to any of these other things. If someone is SSHing into a production box they shouldn't be, that data can already be acquired through the MDM tools and all of the other ways that companies are monitoring people's behavior on their devices. But Traces as a product is a workflow tool, a tool for learning, a tool for teams.”
devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
Asked whether recording agent sessions could make engineering feel like surveillance or push token-maxing, Tarun, who says engineering leaders ask him this daily, argues the data isn't new and how a leader uses it is a choice.
Transcript
…in some sense, but like it's so different in every harness and every model. It's just like, how useful is that number really? Is like attaching the number of bytes your code base like consumes. It's like, okay, cool, useful in some contexts, but for the most part, it's just not useful for workflow.
…coding because we're all using agents nowadays. And seeing that thought process behind that would be huge because everybody's accusing everybody else of slop right now. But I don't think you'd accuse them of slop if you saw their month-long chat with AI that like probed the depths of mathematics.
Yeah, exactly. And those conversations are some of the most interesting. You know, we have some really interesting ones on our that are shared publicly as well. And I think that, you know, your point here is exactly very astute is that agents are the primary interface to really all knowledge work. And obviously software development is where that's sort of led the way there. And there's an argument that a lot of knowledge work can be encoded as software development, but so much knowledge work, whether that's sales, marketing, you know, any kind of operational role, people are using agents for everything. And every single time they use these agents, they are, this is not just like a log of your computer's activity. This is decision data. This is your decisions, your team's decisions. And that decision, that level of fidelity into those decisions should benefit the teams that are using that whose data it is, right? Not just the model providers that are providing the models, right? So a lot of this is like, you know, all about that. That like this idea of like these agents becoming useful beyond development is something that we're seeing as well. We're seeing a lot of sales team useTraces.com in surprising ways on…
There's something that I would, I'd love to sort of like chat through. As you were talking about like thinking of like these certain features as like a call center or something, there's like, you know, classic examples of like engineering orgs getting treated as call centers and that like really…
Yeah, yeah. So great question. And very much a question I talk to engineering leaders every day. And the one question that they ask is like, what happens when my team says this feels like surveillance? Right. Or what happens when my team feels like, hey, this is data that they shouldn't, that is…
well, that wraps it up for our questions. Thanks for coming on and talking about this. This is a super interesting dive into really what the future of coding and knowledge work could look like. So thanks for coming on and talking about it.
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