Adding Logs to the Agent › Why Agents Need Logs

Our assistant has grown considerably since we started building it. It now uses tools, maintains memory, plans multi-step tasks, and reasons through complex problems. Each of these capabilities involves the agent making choices:

• Should I use the calculator tool or try to answer this math question directly?
• Which pieces of conversation history are relevant to include in my context?
• What's the first step in this multi-step plan?
• Do I have enough information to answer, or do I need to call another tool?

When your agent makes the right choice, everything works smoothly. But when it makes the wrong choice, you need to know which decision went wrong and why. Without logs, debugging feels like detective work with no clues. You see the final wrong answer, but you don't know whether the agent:

• Used the wrong tool
• Failed to retrieve relevant information from memory
• Misunderstood the user's request
• Made an error in its reasoning chain

Logs solve this problem by recording what happens at each step. They turn your agent from a black box into something you can observe and understand.