Launch HN: Lucidic (YC W25) – Debug, test, and evaluate AI agents in production

116 points by AbhinavX ↗ HN
Hi HN, we’re Abhinav, Andy, and Jeremy, and we’re building Lucidic AI (https://dashboard.lucidic.ai), an AI agent interpretability tool to help observe/debug AI agents.

Here is a demo: https://youtu.be/Zvoh1QUMhXQ.

Getting started is easy with just one line of code. You just call lai.init() in your agent code and log into the dashboard. You can see traces of each run, cumulative trends across sessions, built-in or custom evals, and grouped failure modes. Call lai.create_step() with any metadata you want, memory snapshots, tool outputs, stateful info, and we'll index it for debugging.

We did NLP research at Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), where we worked on creating an AI agent (w/ fine-tuned models and DSPy) to solve math olympiad problems (focusing on AIME/USAMO); and we realized debugging these agents was hard. But the last straw was when we built an e-commerce agent that could buy items online. It kept failing at checkout, and every one-line change, tweaking a prompt, switching to Llama, adjusting tool logic, meant another 10-minute rerun just to see if we hit the same checkout page.

At this point, we were all like, this sucks, so we improved agent interpretability with better debugging, monitoring, and evals.

We started by listening to users who told us traditional LLM observability platforms don't capture the complexity of agents. Agents have tools, memories, events, not just input/output pairs. So we automatically transform OTel (and/or regular) agent logs into interactive graph visualizations that cluster similar states based on memory and action patterns. We heard that people wanted to test small changes even with the graphs, so we created “time traveling,” where you can modify any state (memory contents, tool outputs, context), then re-simulate 30–40 times to see outcome distributions. We embed the responses, cluster by similarity, and show which modifications lead to stable vs. divergent behaviors.

Then we saw people running their agent 10 times on the same task, watching each run individually, and wasting hours looking at mostly repeated states. So we built trajectory clustering on similar state embeddings (like similar tools or memories) to surface behavioral patterns across mass simulations.

We then use that to create a force-directed layout that automatically groups similar paths your agent took, which displays states as nodes, actions as edges, and failure probability as color intensity. The clusters make failure patterns obvious; you see trends across hundreds of runs, not individual traces.

Finally, when people saw our observability features, they naturally wanted evaluation capabilities. So we developed a concept for people to make their own evals called "rubrics," which lets you define specific criteria, assign weights to each criterion, and set score definitions, giving you a structured way to measure agent performance against your exact requirements.

To evaluate these criteria, we used our own platform to build an investigator agent that reviews your criteria and evaluates performance much more effectively than traditional LLM-as-a-judge approaches.

To get started visit dashboard.lucidic.ai and https://docs.lucidic.ai/getting-started/quickstart. You can use it for free for 1,000 event and step creations.

Look forward to your thoughts! And don’t hesitate to reach out at team@lucidic.ai

17 comments

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I am not an expert but still I am building enough agents. But I don't understand how this tool can be integrated with an exisiting system. Is it like an APM for agents if I understand it correctly ?
I'm looking into a tool like this for my startup. Why should I use this over Langfuse or Helicone?
How does Lucidic define the term "AI agent"?
Congrats on the launch! On a tangential note, is this work open source or do you guys have some technical report that you could share? I am specially interested in your results on the clustering methods for surfacing behavioural patterns. Thanks!
You say your rubric approach is “better than llm as a judge.” Can you please elaborate on what makes you say that?
I do feel frustrated with the current state of evaluations for long-lived sessions with many tool calls -- by default OpenAI's built-in eval system seems to rate chat completions that end with a tool call as "bad" because the tool call response is only in the next completion.

But our stack is in Go and it has been tough to see a lot of observability tools focus on Python rather than an agnostic endpoint proxy like Helicone has.

Hey! I work for the LLM Ops platform LangWatch and I've been working on building out our Go support the past few months as a little hobby of mine (I hope more people adopt this, so I can spend more of my working hours on this).

If you're interested our Go SDK has full support for OpenAI, and any OpenAI compatible endpoints, as well as some nice OpenTelemetry tracing support too.

https://github.com/langwatch/langwatch/tree/main/sdk-go https://github.com/langwatch/langwatch/tree/main/sdk-go/inst...

yet another observability tool thats joining the already overcrowded space
Looks great! debugging agents is a huge pain for me, and this actually looks useful. Love the time travel and trajectory clustering ideas. Bookmarked to try it soon
Congrats on the launch - would be great to read more about the clustering approach you're taking
looks cool—what do you mean clustering similar responses. Usually llm outputs are a bit different would those be the clustered together or is it exact text similarity
Is the front end built using AI? It's unusable on Pixel 8a. You may lose users, please fix the responsive design.
Nice, i think that yall are on the correct path betting on evals, but please make your ui less "generic"
Excited to try this
Love the UX. From the value POV, I am yet to see/experience how it differs from competitors. P.S. I currently use Braintrust and Opik
What kinds of rubrics can one specify? Is there a tutorial or a page with some examples of this kind of rubrics defined in Lucidic?