traceroutine

Process mining for LLM agent traces — where the tokens and the time actually go.

Observability platforms attribute spend by who: per user, per team, per API key. traceroutine attributes it by how — per execution path.

An agent's cost is a property of its trajectory, not of its request.

Three commands, zero instrumentation

If you use Claude Code, the data is already on your disk. No exporter, no collector, no account anywhere:

$ traceroutine ingest ~/.claude/projects -o events.parquet --case task
claude-code: 13,212 events -> events.parquet  (case=task, flatten=genai)

$ traceroutine abstract events.parquet --backend none
21 raw labels -> 18 canonical (rules removed 3) -> 18 activities -> activity_map.yaml

$ traceroutine report events.parquet -f md
vocabulary activity_map.yaml: 18 activities (none:-)
456 cases · 322 paths · $775.91 · rework 89.1% -> report.md
  1. Results of `tool:Bash` carry 12% of the budget through context (up to $93.65)
  2. Loop `chat → tool:Edit` runs an extra time (up to $51.33)
  3. Working rhythm `chat → tool:Bash` — 39% of the budget

That is my own history: 456 tasks. The dollars are API list prices rather than an invoice — I pay a $20 subscription, so this is what those tokens would have cost, not what I was billed. Worth a moment on its own: a flat fee hides a month that prices out at $776. The first finding is the whole thesis:

Results of tool:Bash carry 12% of the budget through context. The step itself burns no tokens and shows as $0.00 in every cost breakdown. But each of its results adds ~1,400 tokens to the prompt, and those are re-read on every subsequent turn: 110M tokens carried in total. Fix by truncating output, not by switching models.

A tool call costs nothing when it happens and keeps costing for the rest of the run. That is why the unit of cost is the path, not the request.

Context re-reading is a known phenomenon — vendors document it. What is missing everywhere else is the attribution: not "context grows", but which step's results carried how many dollars across the rest of the trajectory.

Does it read my code?

A fair question: you are pointing a tool at your entire working history.

Nothing leaves your machine. ingest, report, check and diff make no network calls at all. There is no telemetry, no config in your home directory, no account.

What the event log holds: activity names (tool:Bash, chat), timestamps, token counters, cost, opaque IDs, and the basename of the project directory. No message text, no tool arguments, no file paths, no commands. That is enforced in the adapter rather than in the report — because reports get shared — and it is tested: test_no_message_content_leaks_into_spans, test_project_name_is_basename_only.

The one command that can talk to a cloud is abstract, whose default backend is anthropic. It sends the list of distinct activity names — a few dozen short strings — and nothing else: no events, no counters, no content. To see that list before trusting anyone with it, build the vocabulary offline first:

traceroutine abstract events.parquet --backend none    # no network, ever

The mapping: keys in the resulting activity_map.yaml are exactly the strings a cloud backend would have received. Read them, then decide. --backend ollama keeps the step on your own machine permanently.

Install

uvx traceroutine --help          # no install
pip install traceroutine         # or into your environment

Or on the demo dataset

Synthetic traces with deliberately planted pathologies — a retrieval loop, an escalation to an expensive model, a long tail of rare paths:

git clone https://github.com/gurov/traceroutine && cd traceroutine
uv pip install -e .
python examples/gen_otlp.py examples/traces.json

traceroutine ingest examples/traces.json -o events.parquet
traceroutine report events.parquet -f html -m examples/activity_map.yaml
traceroutine check events.parquet -p examples/process.yaml -m examples/activity_map.yaml

The last command exits 1 and reports that in 60% of runs the agent answers without verifying — which is in the declared process and not in the log.

What it does

ingest <src>	traces → a canonical event log (parquet)
abstract <log>	raw span labels → activity_map.yaml, a semantic vocabulary
report <log>	findings + process graph: -f html or -f md
check <log>	conformance against a declared process.yaml; exit codes for CI
diff <a> <b>	compare two logs: a prompt release, a model swap, two cohorts

report, check and diff pick up ./activity_map.yaml when it is there, and say so.

And this is the process graph of the demo dataset — GitHub renders it straight out of report -f md, no image involved:

flowchart TD
    S(["▶ start"])
    n0["generate<br/>1,136× · $9.50"]
    n1["plan<br/>400×"]
    n2["retrieve<br/>1,251×"]
    n3["notify<br/>27×"]
    n4["respond<br/>400×"]
    n5["remember<br/>209×"]
    n6["verify<br/>298×"]
    n7["fetch_ticket<br/>167×"]
    E(["■ end"])
    n0 -->|582| n2
    n2 -->|542| n2
    S -->|400| n1
    n1 -->|400| n0
    n4 -->|400| E
    n2 -->|389| n0
    n0 -->|298| n6
    n0 -->|241| n4
    n5 -->|209| n0
    n2 -->|167| n7
    n6 -->|159| n4
    n2 -->|153| n5
    n6 -->|127| n2
    n7 -->|111| n0
    n7 -->|56| n5
    n3 -->|27| n0
    n0 -->|15| n3
    n6 -->|12| n3
    classDef hot fill:#b4322e,stroke:#7d1f1c,color:#fff
    classDef err stroke:#d97706,stroke-width:3px
    class n0 hot

Steps shown without a figure spend no tokens at the moment of the call. That is not the same as free: their results stay in the prompt and are re-read on every later turn — see context inflation above.

retrieve → retrieve 542 times is the retrieval loop: a shape you can see in a graph and cannot see in a list of traces.

Sources

Three adapters, three genuinely different data models — which is most of the work:

• OpenTelemetry / OTLP — GenAI semantic conventions, plus OpenInference aliases. A tree of spans.
• Claude Code transcripts — ~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonl. Zero instrumentation. One model response is written as several records sharing a requestId, with usage repeated in each; miss that and cost is overstated 2.1×.
• Chat transcripts — the OpenAI-style messages format public agent corpora ship in. Often no timestamps and no token counts at all.

Case notion — the decision that determines everything

--case trace | session | task | attr:<name> produces different processes from the same data, and the difference is not cosmetic. On real Claude Code transcripts, taking a session as the case gives 61 cases and 61 unique paths: variant analysis degenerates completely, because no two working days are alike. A task — one user request and all the work under it — is the unit that actually repeats.

The abstraction layer

Two levels. Rules strip call arguments, IDs and retry counters — free, offline, reproducible. An LLM does what a regex cannot: decide that validate_answer, self_critique and check_citations are one step called verify. It runs over the set of distinct labels, not over events: two million events have 300–500 distinct shapes, so this is one request rather than two million.

A model is a resource, not an activity: chat:claude-opus-5 and chat:claude-sonnet-5 collapse into chat, and the price difference shows up in the per-resource breakdown.

activity_map.yaml is a versioned project artifact. Its overrides section is hand-edited, wins over mapping, and survives regeneration.

Two quality checks, because one is not enough. --stability N reports the Rand index across runs: if the vocabulary drifts, the reports cannot be trusted. And an automatic merge audit, because the activity counter misses the failure that matters — where the model hits the target count by merging a paid step with a free one. Target met, cost attribution destroyed.

Conformance — the declared process

The finding that shaped the tool: a process mining result is only meaningful relative to an expectation. An open-ended agent has no declared happy path, so every result decays into a description of the norm — "the agent calls Bash a lot" is true and useless. process.yaml is that missing expectation.

name: coding-agent
flow: |
  chat -> (tool:Read | tool:Grep)+ -> (chat | tool:Edit | tool:Bash)* -> chat
rules:
  - last: chat                                 # don't end on a tool call
  - {before: tool:Edit, expect: tool:Read}     # never edit a file you have not read
  - {after: tool:Edit, expect: tool:Bash}      # after editing, run something
  - {max: 40, of: tool:Bash}
thresholds:
  fitness_min: 0.95
  usd_per_case_max: 2.00

Run it against the same log as above:

$ traceroutine check events.parquet -p process.yaml
vocabulary activity_map.yaml
VIOLATED: coding-agent · 456 runs · fitness 0.899 · $1.7015/run
  ✗ fitness 0.899 < 0.950
  ✗ run length p95 111 > 60
  ✗ a run ends with `chat`: violated in 42 runs (9.2%)
  ✗ before `tool:Edit`, `tool:Read` must have happened: violated in 93 runs (20.4%)
  ✗ after `tool:Edit`, `tool:Bash` must eventually follow: violated in 54 runs (11.8%)
  ✗ `tool:Bash` at most 40× per run: violated in 16 runs (3.5%)
  ! declared but never seen in the log: tool:Glob, tool:Grep. Check the activity names…
  off-model: $1.05 (0.1% of budget)

21% of tasks edit a file without reading it first, 12% run no check after an edit, and 9.2% end on a tool call rather than an answer. No unit test sees any of that.

Two notations, and both are needed. The imperative one (flow) yields fitness — a single "how far from the design" number, from aligning each trace against the model's language. The declarative one (rules) answers which specific promise was broken and where. For agents the declarative half matters more, and not as a matter of taste: an agent is non-deterministic by construction, so a rigid sequence scores near-zero fitness and tells you nothing. What you actually expect reads as "whatever else you do, don't answer without checking" — that is the DECLARE vocabulary, and it fits agents better than Petri nets.

Rule forms: always, never, first, last, {after: A, expect: B}, {before: A, expect: B}, {after: A, forbid: B}, {max: N, of: X}, plus allow: (tolerated share of offending runs) and warn: (reported, does not fail the build).

Money is attributed narrowly. never, forbid and max are broken by an extra step, whose cost is known by name. after, always, first, last are broken by something that did not happen — those get no dollar figure at all, rather than a plausible invented one.

In CI

Exit codes: 0 fine, 1 thresholds violated, 2 broken process.yaml. A broken config and a failed check need different reactions, and CI only sees the code. A model written against activities the log does not contain is a broken config, not a violation:

$ traceroutine check events.parquet -p process.yaml     # log never abstracted
process.yaml: process.yaml and the log are at different abstraction levels:
  `chat` — the log has `chat:claude-opus-4-8`, `chat:claude-opus-5`
Nothing is compared against those names, so fitness and the deviation map would both be
fiction. Build the vocabulary and pass it in: …

action.yml is a ready composite action. check writes its own summary — with a mermaid deviation graph — to $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY, and its metrics to $GITHUB_OUTPUT.

- uses: gurov/traceroutine@v1
  with: {traces: traces/, process: process.yaml, case: session}

A complete workflow to copy is in examples/workflow.yml.

With --baseline you also get "no worse than before" thresholds: cost per run, run length, fitness drop. Absolute thresholds need re-tuning after every release; relative ones do not.

What gets computed

• variants (equivalence classes of paths) and the cost of each
• Pareto concentration over per-run cost
• a directly-follows graph weighted by frequency and by money
• rework rate, and the price of each cycle
• separate accounting for cached and cache-written tokens — cache writes cost 1.25–2× input, so ignoring them undercounts, and folding cache reads into input overcounts by 10×
• context inflation — what a step that shows $0.00 actually costs on the rest of the run
• fitness and a deviation map against a declared process

When this will not help you

Stated up front, because a tool that always returns five findings eventually returns five invented ones.

Variant analysis has a measured limit. Path uniqueness climbs from 17% at 1–3 steps to 100% at 26+. Above roughly 13 steps trajectories stop repeating, and "rare paths eat the budget" becomes the tautology "expensive runs are expensive". So the variant lens fits short structured agents — RAG, support, routing — and not long ones. When repeated paths drop below 50%, traceroutine says so and suppresses those findings instead of dressing up a tautology. Abstraction helps but does not rescue it: on synthetic data a vocabulary lifts reuse from 11% to 78%, on real coding traces only from 32% to 37%. Length is the binding constraint, not granularity.

What still works on long runs: context inflation, cohort diff, and conformance — all three get stronger with trace length rather than degenerating.

Architecture

Ingest → Normalize → Abstract → Mine → Analyze → Conform → Render

Adapters are the extension point: a two-method contract (detect, read), see adapters/base.py.

Alignments are implemented here rather than via pm4py, deliberately. pm4py pulls in pandas + scipy + networkx, and uvx traceroutine has to install in seconds; the model language here is a regular expression over activities rather than an arbitrary Petri net, so alignment is exact and fits in a 0-1 BFS; all of pm4py's hard algorithmics exist for unbounded nets, which we do not have. The fitness formula is theirs: 1 − cost / (|trace| + |shortest model run|).

Built on public literature: van der Aalst, Process Mining: Data Science in Action; Leemans, inductive miner; Adriansyah, alignments; Pesic & van der Aalst, DECLARE; OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic conventions; XES / OCEL 2.0.

Status

Alpha, and honest about it: it runs end to end on three sources, it has been validated against real data twice, and it has 149 tests. The interactive graph renderer is not built yet — the graph above is a static sketch.

License

Apache-2.0