spent the last few weeks building an alternative to heavy AI observability tools because I was tired of messy logs. need feedback from nextjs/node devs.

I've been building a few projects using Vercel AI SDK and OpenAI recently, and honestly, debugging prompts in production has been an absolute nightmare. Checking logs for token usage or trying to find exactly why a prompt failed by digging through lines of stdout just felt super inefficient. I looked into existing AI observability tools but most of them felt too bloated, heavy, or required a massive enterprise setup just to track a simple chain. So I decided to build a lightweight alternative myself. It’s basically a zero-dependency npm SDK that hooks into your backend and streams traces to a clean dashboard so you can see latency, token costs, and errors in real-time. Syntax is pretty straightforward: import { TracePilot } from 'tracepilot-sdk'; const tp = new TracePilot({ apiKey: process.env.TRACEPILOT\_API\_KEY }); // then you just wrap your ai call await tp.trace({ name: "my-agent" }, async () => { return await yourAICall(); });