
ML/AI Engineer @zenml_io, researcher (& author of a few books + PhD 👨🎓). feedback welcome https://xitter.cf/t.co/W6fKtTKoPv 🙏
Delft, The Netherlands
Joined January 2011
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Finally got round to adding in a way to subscribe to my blog / site via email. (Always supported RSS, but seems that's gone out of fashion a bit 🤷 )
Also added in a way to browse some of the blog series I've written over the years instead of just scrolling through a huge long list of posts.
Please do subscribe if you want to get an email whenever I write new posts!
alexstrick.com/subscribe.htm…
alexstrick.com/series.html
Alex Strick van Linschoten retweeted
When I started looking into agent swarm observability, I really wanted some real data to work with. I wasn't really able to find much, so I created my own and am releasing it on the @huggingface Hub for others to use.
I recorded 19 runs of 18 agents that were all working on building a small Lisp interpreter. I used a custom recorder (more about this at a later date perhaps) which records from underneath the agents rather than just relying on their own reports. So I tracked all the programmes they ran, every file they read or wrote, every model call, every message between them and so on. In some runs I planted faults on purpose (bad commands, rewritten logs, incomplete specs).
All in all it's 8.9 million events. 10 runs come with answer keys. 9 are held back as a test set.
AFAIK, most multi-agent datasets are ~5 agents large only, and none of them record file reads and writes. So I hope this dataset can help people working on swarm observability and those building tools to help debug multi-agent swarms.
Enjoy! (I'll also try to write this up with a bit more detail on my blog later) huggingface.co/datasets/zenm…
Alex Strick van Linschoten retweeted
4 real production LLM use cases (curated by yours truly).
2x per week. Under 3 minutes to read.
Next email going out on Tuesday. Subscribe here: zenml.io/llmops-database
Alex Strick van Linschoten retweeted
Finally got round to adding in a way to subscribe to my blog / site via email. (Always supported RSS, but seems that's gone out of fashion a bit 🤷 )
Also added in a way to browse some of the blog series I've written over the years instead of just scrolling through a huge long list of posts.
Please do subscribe if you want to get an email whenever I write new posts!
alexstrick.com/subscribe.htm…
alexstrick.com/series.html
When I started looking into agent swarm observability, I really wanted some real data to work with. I wasn't really able to find much, so I created my own and am releasing it on the @huggingface Hub for others to use.
I recorded 19 runs of 18 agents that were all working on building a small Lisp interpreter. I used a custom recorder (more about this at a later date perhaps) which records from underneath the agents rather than just relying on their own reports. So I tracked all the programmes they ran, every file they read or wrote, every model call, every message between them and so on. In some runs I planted faults on purpose (bad commands, rewritten logs, incomplete specs).
All in all it's 8.9 million events. 10 runs come with answer keys. 9 are held back as a test set.
AFAIK, most multi-agent datasets are ~5 agents large only, and none of them record file reads and writes. So I hope this dataset can help people working on swarm observability and those building tools to help debug multi-agent swarms.
Enjoy! (I'll also try to write this up with a bit more detail on my blog later) huggingface.co/datasets/zenm…
Constantly have this scene / interface on my mind when thinking about agent swarm observability... #minorityreport
4 real production LLM use cases (curated by yours truly).
2x per week. Under 3 minutes to read.
Next email going out on Tuesday. Subscribe here: zenml.io/llmops-database
As I learn more about agent swarm observability, I've been guessing at what people are recording about their agent swarms. I collated what I found, the evidence each one needs, and some ideas for capturing it. If you work on this, lmk where I'm wrong!
Alex Strick van Linschoten retweeted
Replay your agent's real failures after every prompt, tool, or model change
Why agent swarms need observability tools built for them: a 2000-agent example, the historian's case for treating agent explanations as testimony rather than fact, and a look at what exists so far.
What's behind this restriction on uploading new skills to @claudeai @ClaudeDevs in the claude.ai web interface? V annoying. How is one to upload a skill with many files? Just don't do it?
Claude Projects (@ClaudeDevs @claudeai) are sort of terrible in practice. I like the idea, but claude browser use is so flaky / buggy. When Claude is doing something in whatever chrome browser it uses, it completely takes over my screen, and the screen flickers every 2 seconds.
No idea what the main orchestrator thread is supposed to do. Nothing ever seems to happen there. Everything just happens in the threads. You never seem to get messages bubbling up to the main chat / thread.
Each thread desperately want to not work locally, too. They all start off as cloud threads, even when told specifically that all the useful files are gitignored and only available locally. Then we get weird stuff resulting from this where some sub-threads writes that it's unable to communicate with other threads and writes this to me: "What I need from you: paste this line to the session running on your Mac. I can’t message it directly."
Just feels like a really buggy interface / part of the Claude Desktop product atm.
cc @lydiahallie I think? not sure how to get this feedback in.
Alex Strick van Linschoten retweeted
Kitaru by @zenml_io can reuse recorded tool outputs when the same tool calls happen again, while changed calls can execute from scratch.
So I can change a:
• Prompt
• Tool
• Model
• Skill
• Piece of the harness
...then replay the same failure and see whether I fixed it.
Alex Strick van Linschoten retweeted
Kitaru by @zenml_io records Decode runs as sessions, helps turn recurring failures into cohorts, and lets me replay those same sessions after changing the harness.
The replay part is useful...
Recreating the exact context that caused an agent to fail can be painful.
Alex Strick van Linschoten retweeted
5/ Create an evaluator
Write one evaluator for each failure class that answers a simple question:
Did this failure happen again?
6/ Fix → replay → compare
This is where I've been using Kitaru by @zenml_io.
Alex Strick van Linschoten retweeted
3/ Group failures by type
Cluster similar failures together, then prioritize them based on frequency × severity.
4/ Find the root cause
Trace each important failure back through the session to understand where things actually broke.
Alex Strick van Linschoten retweeted
1/ Record real agent runs
Capture the entire session, including every LLM and tool call.
2/ Review them manually
Take a sample and label each run pass/fail with a short critique explaining what went wrong.
I prefer binary labels over 1-5 scores.
A "fail" tells me something needs fixing.
A "3" doesn't.
Alex Strick van Linschoten retweeted
Fail me once, shame on the AI agent.
Fail me twice, I need better regression tests...
That's the rule I've started following while building Decode (the coding agent I'm building from scratch).
Because your agent will eventually fail.
The important part is what you do with that failure...










