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Author
Macy Mody
Macy Mody writes about production LLM agents, agent observability, and AI agent optimization at Papaya.
macy@papaya.fyi- Agent optimization
- LLM observability
- Production agent workflows
Articles and posts by Macy Mody
Comparisons
Langfuse Alternatives (2026): 7 Tools Compared
Why teams leave Langfuse, what each alternative is best at, verified pricing and licensing as of October 2026, and when Langfuse is still the right call.
Comparisons
LangSmith Alternatives (2026): 7 Tools Compared
Per-seat pricing, retention, self-hosting, and framework fit: why teams leave LangSmith, what Engine does that you would give up, and the best alternative for each situation.
Comparisons
Braintrust Alternatives (2026): 7 Tools Compared
The $249 jump, data-plus-scores metering, and enterprise-only self-hosting: why teams leave Braintrust, the best alternative for each reason, and when Braintrust is still right.
Agent optimization
How to Turn Agent Traces into Improvements
Most teams collect traces and never act on them. The agent improvement loop that turns traces into ranked, shipped, and verified fixes, and what those fixes usually look like.
Agent reliability
AI Agent Failure Patterns: A Field Guide from Production Traces
False completion, retry loops, ignored tool errors, context bloat, skipped verification. The ten patterns behind most production agent failures, as they actually appear in traces.
Article
Agent Optimization vs. Observability: Why Watching Isn't Fixing
Your dashboard saw the bad run and did nothing. The gap isn't between having data and not — it's between seeing what happened and knowing what to change.
Product updates
Product Updates - June 16
The Papaya team has been hard at work filling feature requests. Here are some of the latest from this week's releases.
Blog
Observability is not enough.
Teams are buying observability, but it seems that what they need is prediction and action.