Claude Code, Codex, and other coding agents are becoming long-running, tool-using systems that read repositories, execute commands, modify code, call external services, and make decisions with limited human supervision. Yet most teams observe them primarily through token counts and final pull requests. This talk applies familiar SRE practices to agentic development. We’ll instrument a coding-agent workflow with OpenTelemetry, examine traces of tool calls, failures, retries, tests and code changes, and look at what those traces reveal about reliability that the final output hides. We’ll cover practical failure patterns, useful signals, and where traditional observability concepts translate well - and where they don’t.
Elliot Gardiner is a software engineer and former principal SRE with 13 years of experience building and operating large-scale systems. He is the founder of Code Telemetry, an observability platform for AI coding agents, and co-founder of Mirror Panel, a synthetic research platform focused on measuring and improving the reliability of AI-generated audience insight. His current work sits at the intersection of AI systems, observability, developer infrastructure, and reliability.
