Using coding agent traces to improve your workflows

This article explains why coding harnesses need observability, since model invocations, tool calls, retries and dead ends happen out of view, and describes how Logfire's coding agent tracing captures model invocations, tool call execution and request/response pairings across sessions. It walks through use cases including dashboards for productivity, cost and time, monitoring a software factory, reusing past session context across harnesses, and turning repeated struggles into skills, with an example where a skill took dashboard panel creation from 3/12 to 12/12 passing cases. It closes with an evaluation workflow that compares reviewer harnesses on a dataset of five code review cases, where Codex with gpt-6-luna scored highest overall at 3.93, ahead of Cursor at 2.80 and Claude Code at 2.60.