Observability Is Product Work

I used to think of observability as something you add when the system becomes big enough to deserve it.

Now I think that is too late.

Observability is not only for infrastructure teams. It is product work. It tells you whether the thing you shipped is behaving the way users need it to behave.

That is especially true for AI products, where the system can fail in ways that do not look like a normal error.

Not every failure throws an exception

A checkout flow either works or it does not. A login either succeeds or it fails. There are still edge cases, but the shape of the problem is familiar.

AI features are different. A response can be technically successful and still be wrong, vague, expensive, slow, or unhelpful.

If all you track is whether the request returned a 200, you are missing the actual product behavior.

I want to know things like:

How often the model falls back

Which prompts are slow

Which retrieval queries return weak context

Where users retry or abandon

Which outputs are corrected by a person

How cost changes as usage grows

That data changes the way you build.

Good logs reduce panic

When production breaks, unclear logs make everyone guess. Good logs make the system feel less mysterious.

I do not mean logging everything. That creates noise and can create privacy problems. I mean logging the right events with enough context to understand what happened later.

For AI systems, that usually means tracking request type, model route, latency, token usage, retrieval metadata, fallback reason, and a safe reference to the user flow.

The goal is not surveillance. The goal is accountability.

Product decisions need feedback loops

Observability also helps with taste. You might think a feature is clear, then the data shows users keep asking the same follow-up. You might think a response is fast enough, then usage shows the wait feels bad on mobile. You might think a model is cheap enough, then one workflow quietly eats the budget.

Without visibility, those lessons arrive late.

I want calm systems

The best systems are not the ones that never fail. Everything fails.

The best systems fail in ways you can see, understand, and improve.

That is why I treat observability as part of the product from the beginning. It makes engineering calmer. It makes decisions better. It makes the user experience more honest.