Tarun Sachdeva - Traces

This week we're joined by Tarun Sachdeva, founder of Traces and previously head of product at Wattpad. Traces gives coding agent sessions a home: a CLI that collects sessions from Claude Code, Codex and other harnesses, and traces.com, where you can share them like pushing code to GitHub and link them to the commits and pull requests they produced. We talk about why agent sessions are decision data worth keeping, privacy and sharing defaults, rethinking code review as its own agent session, Surfaces for visualizing tokens, skills and security risks, and how teams can use trace data to learn without it feeling like surveillance. https://traces.com https://traces.com/blog https://traces.com/blog/surfaces https://traces.com/blog/agent-sessions-are-a-dataset https://x.com/tarunsachdeva https://github.com/tarunsachdeva https://market.dev 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:14 Tarun's Background and Career 00:05:48 Why Traces Was Built 00:09:53 How Traces Works 00:13:57 Privacy and Sharing Defaults 00:17:20 Git Commits and Code Review 00:18:57 Ad 00:20:01 Reviewing PRs with Traces 00:23:57 What Surfaces Are 00:28:09 PR Storytelling and Session Effort 00:37:25 Cost of Agent Sessions 00:40:42 Traces Beyond Coding 00:43:31 Data Culture and Surveillance Concerns 00:52:04 Closing Thoughts and Thanks Full show notes and transcript: https://devtools.fm/episode/180