Watson: A Cognitive Observability Framework for the Reasoning of Foundation Model-Powered Agents

As foundation models (FMs) play an increasingly prominent role in complex software systems, such as FM-powered agentic software (i.e., Agentware), they introduce significant challenges for developers regarding observability. Unlike traditional software, agents operate autonomously, using extensive data and opaque implicit reasoning, making it difficult to observe and understand their behavior during runtime, especially when they take unexpected actions or encounter errors. In this paper, we highlight the limitations of traditional operational observability in the context of FM-powered software, and introduce cognitive observability as a new type of required observability that has emerged for such innovative systems. We then propose a novel framework that provides cognitive observability into the implicit reasoning processes of agents (a.k.a. reasoning observability), and demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in boosting the debuggability of Agentware and, in turn, the abilities of an Agentware through a case study on AutoCodeRover, a cuttingedge Agentware for autonomous program improvement.