Post

Starting to wonder if the next gen of o11y products isn’t just: ingests OTLP into ClickHouse and/or DataLake for you and allows you to set alerts (for agents, not people)

Kinda? I agree the UI part isn't the "most" useful part. Where the UI becomes useful is helping a human understand the data, and claude artifacts are "fine", but still not great. From a backend perspective, its more than just querying data with SQL/PromQL. The backend can do more.

We've been seeing this with people resorting to "codemode" type mechanisms. We've taken a different stance and our MCP does more than just an API reference, it does so much more than that, and does it server-side. Providing additional context, and rendering is something the backend can do.

I don't think MCP should be just an API reference so I agree there, but also I wouldn't call codemode something to "resort" to. It's a really important primitive. I'm also trying to think a year+ out. Claude artifacts are not great... yet.

I still think UI is important. Having something exist outside of a chat is important. Collaborating with other humans / agents is important. Human understanding is important. But I also wonder if I'm a dinosaur The conclusion I can't avoid is the harness eating everything bsky.app/profile/jere...

Jeremy Morrell@jeremymorrell.dev

Every time I follow this line of thinking I end up on this path: - Agents produce too much text and humans need visualizations for basically everything we do - it’s inevitable that this gets built into the harness and models - what is left for o11y products in this new world?

0 reposts0 likes

I've spent the last few months building something (hopefully released in a few weeks) using fully agentic development. Obviously it has top notch observability What I've noticed is that codemode is a kludge used when the MCP can't do it. String together APIs to perform a higher order outcome

The "ideal" scenario is that the backend already provides the analysis you want, packages that up and send that to the agent. If that's fast enough, you get way better workflows with an agent. Time is important for synchronous coding with an agent, even in async to an extent.

So to me, codemode is covering a gap in the MCP (or API for that matter). Can the MCP bring back the most used HTTP routes on the pods with the most CPU? What about a breakdown of all the attributes unique to a subset of logs in a wider dataset?

What about showing the comparison of this query to the same query 2 weeks ago? Is that 2 requests with codemode? Or a flag on the MCP tool call? MCPs should be tailored to agentic workflow asks, not mapped to APIs, or codemode tasks.