Essays

Everything I've written on The Davenporter, newest first. Most posts start with a question someone asked me, then work through what I've tried, what broke, and what I'd do next. The WIBTM series covers what I'm building right now, and why.

Latest · Aug 27, 2026 · 3 min read

From trajectories to lineage: building better agent telemetry

A conceptual map of how to establish provenance for agent decisions using the existing tools we have today. In agent analysis and tracking, traces and trajectories are becoming well established for understanding a particular decision, or a session of decisions and events that an agent makes.

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Aug 18, 2026 · 5 min read WIBTM · Source Control · Agent Telemetry

WIBTM: Add telemetry and observability to your AI agents

Telemetry and observability give you the means to start capturing data that make your agent systems long running, and improve their capabilities over time.

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Jun 16, 2026 · 6 min read Source Control · Agent Telemetry

How to Track AI Agent Lineage and Manage State in Code Repositories

Moving beyond clean git commits to knowledge systems for agentic development.

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Jun 09, 2026 · 4 min read Agent Telemetry

With AI, what's old is new in telemetry again

Why tracing is critical to improving your AI experiences

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Git files vs. a symbol graph

From "WIBTM: What happens when you let an agent design a new git system?" — why cosm locks functions instead of files so several agents can edit the same codebase at once.

Core themes from the archive
Theme	Essay	Code
Why your coding agent needs a blast-radius tool	WIBTM: What happens when you let an agent design a new git system?	`davenportjw/cosm`
How I built a self-improving coding system	Give an agent access to memories...	`davenportjw/agentic-memory`
The warehouse and hybrid model routing	WIBTD/M/L: Routing AI responses between local and cloud models	`davenportjw/smartrouter` & `warehouse-dash`

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