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Agent Blackbox: Visual Timelines for Local Incident Review

Use HTML postmortems to inspect gateway activity while keeping correlation heuristics and privacy limits visible.

2 min read
Agent Blackbox: Visual Timelines for Local Incident Review
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Current repository behavior
Reviewed September 5, 2026 against the public Agent Blackbox repository. It is a pre-1.0 pilot with no GitHub release or PyPI publication found in this review. Install from a reviewed checkout; do not assume pip install agent-blackbox is a published package.

Long gateway logs are difficult to read because an incoming message, a tool failure, and a later outbound flush may be far apart. Agent Blackbox’s HTML report groups those events into a timeline so an engineer can inspect the incident without manually scanning the entire log.

Generate a report from supported gateway logs

bash
agent-blackbox demo
python agent_doctor.py export-html --minutes 180 --out exports/postmortem.html
# Alias for the same export path:
python agent_doctor.py visual --minutes 180 --out exports/postmortem.html

The demo uses synthetic evidence. The gateway export commands need supported local gateway logs; they do not manufacture an incident from an empty machine. Review the generated file before sharing it.

Read the timeline as evidence

  • Filter for errors to identify candidate failures.
  • Check incoming messages and outgoing flushes in order.
  • Search for relevant identifiers without exposing private values.
  • Compare the diagnosis with the underlying events.
  • Record missing evidence alongside the conclusion.

A correlated flush is not delivery proof

The current analyzer uses FIFO timestamp correlation when stable message/response IDs are absent. Each flush is consumed once, so one outbound event cannot satisfy several inbound messages. It is still a heuristic: a matched flush does not prove that the intended recipient received the expected content.

Local HTML does not remove every risk

The visual export is designed for local review and escapes event text. The report may still contain sensitive contextual information after redaction. Keep raw source logs private and inspect what a recipient will actually see.

Use the right input adapter

Current Agent Blackbox also supports command recordings, Claude Code transcripts, Codex rollouts, OpenCode sessions, and a normalized JSON/JSONL event contract. These adapters feed diagnostics about missing or failed tool results and risky behavior. They should not be confused with a gateway-only visual timeline.

bash
agent-blackbox analyze-events path/to/events.jsonl --format json --fail-on-incident

The file must contain supported normalized events. Unknown schema versions, malformed records, unknown event types, and empty input fail visibly. The recording guide explains sanitized capture and its limits.

Current project documentation

Dhiraj Das

About the Author

Dhiraj Das is an Automation Consultant with over a decade of experience building systems that expose failures, reduce flakiness, and make complex workflows repeatable. He applies that discipline to AI-agent validation, LLM testing, and postmortems.

He shares small open source utilities from real automation work, including: waitless (flaky tests), sb-stealth-wrapper (bot detection), selenium-teleport (state persistence), selenium-chatbot-test (AI chatbot testing), lumos-shadowdom (Shadow DOM), and visual-guard (visual regression).

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