TraceForge

Portable trace envelopes for governed agent execution.

TraceForge defines lightweight trace envelopes and event schemas for recording, inspecting, and summarizing governed agent execution flows.

As agent systems become more modular, it becomes harder to understand what actually happened during execution:

• which actor ran
• under which contract
• with which authorization
• what events occurred
• what outcome was produced
• where provenance came from

TraceForge exists to make those execution traces more portable, inspectable, and easier to summarize.

Why TraceForge

Many agent systems already produce logs or traces, but they are often:

• runtime-specific
• hard to compare
• difficult to inspect quickly
• weak on provenance
• weak on replay summaries
• not designed as portable execution artifacts

TraceForge introduces a lightweight trace layer for modular agent systems.

Core goals

• define portable execution traces
• validate trace structure
• summarize execution timelines
• improve inspectability
• support provenance-aware trace artifacts
• provide a developer-friendly CLI

Initial scope

TraceForge v0 starts with:

• trace.json parsing
• trace validation
• human-readable explanation
• pretty rendering
• replay summaries
• example traces

Later phases may add:

• richer event semantics
• trace linking
• adapter layers
• contract/captoken-aware validation
• export formats
• replay tooling

Example

traceforge validate ./examples/research-trace
traceforge inspect ./examples/research-trace
traceforge explain ./examples/research-trace
traceforge pretty ./examples/research-trace
traceforge replay-summary ./examples/research-trace

Philosophy

TraceForge is not a full observability platform.

It is a lightweight specification and inspection layer for governed and portable agent execution traces.

Roadmap

See:

• docs/vision.md
• docs/architecture.md
• docs/trace-spec.md
• docs/roadmap.md