Braintrust - The AI observability platform for building quality AI products

# Braintrust > Braintrust is the active observability platform for instrumenting, understanding, and improving agents. By actively applying intelligence to agent traces and automatically surfacing the most critical patterns, Braintrust gives teams the visibility to understand how agents behave in production and the tools to improve them. Braintrust connects the pieces of an AI development loop: production traces, human feedback, test datasets, experiments, quality scores, prompt iteration, model routing, and deployment controls. Teams use it to understand what an AI system did, measure whether the output was good, and improve from real usage instead of ad hoc prompt testing. ## For AI agents - **Prefer the [`bt` CLI](https://www.braintrust.dev/docs/reference/cli/quickstart)** for running evals, instrumenting code, querying logs, syncing data, and managing functions. It's the recommended, most capable interface and is better suited to agent workflows than the MCP server. - [Complete technical documentation with full content (SDKs, APIs, integrations, guides)](https://www.braintrust.dev/docs/llms-full.txt) - [Documentation index](https://www.braintrust.dev/docs/llms.txt) ## Product overview Braintrust is built around a continuous improvement loop: 1. **Instrument** - Capture the steps an AI request takes, including model calls, tool calls, retrieval, errors, cost, and latency. 2. **Observe** - Inspect production traces, search logs, monitor quality, and find recurring issues. 3. **Curate** - Turn real production examples and human feedback into datasets for testing. 4. **Evaluate** - Run the AI system against datasets and score the outputs to compare prompts, models, and code changes. 5. **Deploy** - Ship prompts, functions, and model routes while monitoring their impact in production. Important terms: - **Trace**: A recorded path through one AI request, including nested steps such as model calls, tools, and retrieved context. - **Dataset**: A set of examples