What is agent observability?

Agent observability is a concept in personal epistemology: Agent monitoring provides the data you need to optimize your cognitive systems.

Example: You delegated your morning planning to a checklist system three months ago. It felt productive at first. But you never measured whether it actually improved your output — you just assumed it did because you were checking boxes. When you finally tracked completion rates against actual goal progress over two weeks, you discovered that 60% of your checklist items had zero correlation with your quarterly objectives. Without monitoring, you optimized for activity. With monitoring, you could optimize for results.

This concept is part of Phase 28 (Agent Monitoring) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent monitoring.