Agent Archaeology
Reconstruct what AI agents saw, decided, and did.
A practical field guide for agentic events, tool use, conversations, sessions, traces, and evidence.
Why Agent Archaeology?
Agents now leave evidence across the whole workspace.
AI agents now operate across editors, terminals, browsers, filesystems, APIs, and internal tools. Their work can be useful, surprising, or risky. When an agentic event matters, teams need a practical way to reconstruct what happened: the prompt, the context, the tools, the actions, the outputs, and the evidence left behind.
What is an agentic event?
An agentic event is a bounded sequence where an AI agent receives context, makes choices, invokes tools or produces instructions, and leaves artifacts that can be preserved and reviewed.
- 5
- Evidence Layers
- 30+
- Starter Pages
- Static
- Site Model
- Open
- Practice
Prompts, sessions, tools, traces, provenance
Concepts, field guide, resources, Telltale
Fast, readable, Cloudflare Pages-ready
Contributor-friendly and source-linked
Agentic Forensics basics
Start with approachable artifacts before diving into product-specific telemetry.
Conversations
Prompts and responses show visible intent and context, but rarely capture the whole event.
Sessions
Session stores preserve continuity across prompts, tools, workspaces, and resumed runs.
Tools
Tool calls show how agents read, write, execute, query, browse, and cross trust boundaries.
Evidence and provenance
Keep the chain visible.
Agent evidence is often exported, normalized, redacted, summarized, and correlated. Preserve source artifacts, hash important records, and label the difference between observed facts and inferred intent.
Read about provenanceTelltale
Detection and telemetry for coding agents.
Telltale is an open-source detection and telemetry layer for AI coding agents and agentic development environments. It is a project hub here, not the whole field.
Explore TelltaleField Guide preview
Practical guides for real artifacts.
Help build the field guide.
Contribute definitions, examples, workflows, checklists, schemas, and field reports that help practitioners understand and investigate agentic systems.
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