SideSeat

AI Development Workbench — Debug, trace, and understand your AI agents.

What is SideSeat?

AI agents are hard to debug. Requests fly by, context builds up, and when something fails you're left guessing.

SideSeat captures every LLM call, tool call, and agent decision, then displays them in a web UI as they happen. Run it locally during development, or deploy to your private cloud for team visibility.

Built on OpenTelemetry — the open standard already supported by most AI frameworks.

Quick Start

npx sideseat

Open localhost:5388 and instrument your agent. Here's Strands Agents as an example — see the setup guide for Vercel AI SDK, Google ADK, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, OpenAI Agents, and others.

With SideSeat SDK — automatic setup, one import:

pip install strands-agents sideseat
# or
uv add strands-agents sideseat

from sideseat import SideSeat, Frameworks
from strands import Agent

SideSeat(framework=Frameworks.Strands)

agent = Agent()
response = agent("What is 2+2?")
print(response)

Without SideSeat SDK — manual OpenTelemetry setup:

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:5388/otel/default
pip install 'strands-agents[otel]'

from strands.telemetry import StrandsTelemetry
from strands import Agent

telemetry = StrandsTelemetry()
telemetry.setup_otlp_exporter()

agent = Agent()
response = agent("What is 2+2?")
print(response)

SDKs: Python (PyPI) | JavaScript (npm)

Features

• Real-time tracing — Watch LLM requests and tool calls as they happen
• Message threading — See full conversations, tool calls, and images
• Cost tracking — Automatic token counting and cost calculation

Usage

sideseat              # Start with defaults
sideseat --port 8080  # Custom port
sideseat --no-auth    # Disable authentication
sideseat --help       # Show all options

Requires Node.js 18+ on macOS, Linux, or Windows.

Compatibility

Agent frameworks — Strands Agents, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, Google ADK, OpenAI Agents, LangChain, PydanticAI

LLM providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini

Telemetry — Vercel AI SDK, OpenInference, MLflow, Logfire

Resources

• Documentation
• GitHub
• Issues

License

Apache-2.0