The logs I never read

In an era of increasing reliance on LLM-assisted coding agents, the complexity of bug detection remains a critical challenge, particularly when dealing with distributed systems that involve multiple service layers and third-party interactions. Despite the abundance of log data generated by tools like Pydantic Logfire, identifying and resolving bugs requires careful correlation of logs with source code, a task that LLMs can assist with by accessing production logs via integration protocols like Logfire MCP. A specific case is discussed where a customer issue was traced back to a parsing error due to a mismatch in data type expectations between the OpenTelemetry specification and a third-party log emitter, highlighting both the advantages and limitations of relying on AI tools in debugging. The problem arose from the third-party system sending 64-bit integers as literals, contrary to the OpenTelemetry spec, which requires them to be strings due to JavaScript's integer size limitations. This incident underscores the continuing need for human intuition and intervention in debugging, even as AI tools take on larger roles in the process.