"Why did the Agent do that?"
If you are building Agentic systems today, this is the question that keeps you up at night. AI Agents are inherently non-deterministic. They loop, they reason, and they call multiple tools in sequences that are hard to predict. When a multi-step task fails, a traditional stack trace is useless. You don't just need to know where the code crashed; you need to know what the AI was thinking.
In this seventeenth article, and the conclusion of our Engine volume, we explore how apcore integrates with OpenTelemetry (OTel) to turn the "Black Box" of AI reasoning into a transparent, traceable "Glass Box."
The Concept of the "Thought Span"
In traditional distributed tracing, a "Span" represents a single unit of work—like an HTTP request or a database query. In apcore, we introduce the Thought Span.
