I Let GitHub Copilot CLI Read a Failed AI-Agent Trace—Here’s What It Found
I use GitHub Copilot CLI for practical development work: understanding unfamiliar code, reviewing changes, generating tests, and debugging from the terminal. After writing my beginner’s guide to GitHub Copilot CLI , I wanted to test a harder question: Can a coding assistant diagnose an AI-agent failure from structured execution evidence instead of a wall of logs? This matters to me as a…
I connected AgentInspect to GitHub Copilot CLI in a controlled experiment to see if a coding assistant could diagnose an AI-agent failure using structured execution evidence. The experiment used a simple TypeScript project-help agent that retrieved project documentation, formatted it into context, validated the context, and generated an answer.
The issue was that the formatter used the wrong optional field, causing the context to be unusable and resulting in a generic "not enough project context" response. Despite the bug, the workflow still ran and recorded useful metadata, such as the number of retrieved chunks and the length of the usable context. The experiment showed that a coding assistant can identify runtime issues in an AI-agent, even if the failure is not immediately evident in logs.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
