How much visibility should we have into what AI agents are doing? 🤖
I’ve been thinking about this a lot while building Verzii.
As AI agents become more capable, we’re giving them more responsibility to plan, execute, make decisions, and work in the background.
But there’s an interesting problem:
How do you know what your agent is actually doing when you’re not watching it?
A simple activity log is probably not enough.
I’d want to quickly understand:
What is the agent doing right now?
Why did it make that decision?
What has it already completed?
What is waiting for my input?
Did something fail or go in an unexpected direction?
Can I safely let it continue without monitoring it?
We're exploring some of these ideas while building Verzii, and it has made me realize that trust and visibility might become just as important as the intelligence of the agent itself.
Curious what other makers think:
Would you rather have an AI agent that works completely autonomously, or one that keeps you constantly informed about what it’s doing?
And where do you draw the line between useful visibility and information overload?
Replies
Dial
for me it's less "autonomous vs monitored" and more about which actions are reversible. anything I can undo or that costs nothing to redo, I want the agent to just do without asking. anything irreversible or costly - sending something external, spending money, deleting something - I want a pause, even if it slows things down.
on the overload question: a full activity log is technically visibility but nobody actually reads it after day one. what's worked better for us is a short "what changed and why" digest instead of a raw trace - closer to a changelog than a log file. if I want the full trace I can dig for it, but the default view should already tell me if anything needs my attention.
MonoCloud for Startups
I don’t think I’d want an agent constantly telling me what it is doing. I’d want the ability to trace what happened when I need to, but I think there is another layer here too: what was the agent actually allowed to do in the first place?
An agent can be correctly identified and still have far more authority than it needs. So for me, trust would come from both sides. I should be able to understand what the agent did, but there should also be clear boundaries around which APIs it can access and what authority it gets before it acts.
Constant visibility without those boundaries would still make me nervous.