v0.1.0-alpha.1

TraceForge v0.1.0-alpha.1

First public alpha release of TraceForge — a lightweight trace layer for governed agent execution.

Tagline: Portable trace envelopes for governed agent execution.

Why TraceForge

As agent systems become more modular, it becomes harder to understand what actually happened during execution:

• which actor ran
• under which context
• with which governing artifacts
• what events occurred
• what outcome was produced
• where provenance came from

Many systems already produce logs or traces, but those artifacts are often runtime-specific, hard to inspect, weak on provenance, and not designed as portable execution records.

TraceForge exists to make execution traces more portable, inspectable, and easier to summarize.

What’s included in this alpha

Core trace model

• trace.json parsing
• portable trace envelope structure
• support for:
  • trace identity
  • actor
  • context
  • status
  • events
  • outcome
  • provenance
  • optional references to contracts and capability tokens

Validation and governance-aware checks

• structural trace validation
• validation of missing or weak trace signals
• governance-oriented checks for trace consistency
• validation fixtures for invalid trace and invalid governance cases

CLI

Initial CLI commands for working with traces:

• validate
• inspect
• explain
• pretty
• replay-summary
• compare
• format
• init

Output and tooling

• machine-readable JSON output support
• initial CLI JSON contract support
• trace comparison support
• scaffold/init flow for new traces

Schemas and examples

• trace schema
• example traces for:
  • research
  • extraction
  • degraded execution
• example attached artifacts for contracts and capability tokens

Documentation and OSS readiness

• README and technical docs
• CHANGELOG
• CONTRIBUTING
• CODE_OF_CONDUCT
• SECURITY
• GitHub Actions CI
• release workflow with conditional publish behavior
• verified package contents via npm pack --dry-run

Current positioning

TraceForge is not a full observability platform.

It is a focused specification and inspection layer for portable, governed, and provenance-aware execution traces in modular agent systems.

Its role is to help make execution easier to:

• inspect
• compare
• summarize
• reason about
• connect to surrounding governance artifacts

What is not included yet

This alpha does not yet aim to provide:

• dashboard-based observability
• distributed ingestion pipelines
• full runtime streaming
• SIEM integrations
• advanced trace storage backends
• enterprise compliance bundles

Those areas may be explored in future iterations, but this release intentionally keeps the scope narrow and practical.

Notes

• This is an alpha release.
• Trace semantics, JSON output structure, and versioning policy may evolve.
• The current focus is a portable and inspectable foundation for governed execution traces.

Feedback

Feedback, issues, and suggestions are welcome through GitHub as the project evolves.