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Tapes

Tapes is agent telemetry for LLM interactions. It transparently captures provider calls, keeps their original request and response data in an append-only log, and derives a browsable model of sessions, traces, and spans.

Use Tapes to inspect agent work, measure token use and cost, search previous work by meaning, export sessions, and turn successful sessions into reusable skills.

Quickstart

Tapes ships as two binaries: tapes, the server, and tapesctl, the client that captures sessions and reads them back. Install both:

curl -fsSL https://download.tapes.dev/install | bash
curl -sSfL https://download.tapes.dev/tapesctl/install | bash

Docker is required for the bundled local dependencies. Start PostgreSQL with pgvector and Ollama with the default embeddinggemma embedding model:

tapes local up

tapes local up writes the resulting PostgreSQL, pgvector, and Ollama settings to the active .tapes/config.toml. If native Ollama is already installed, Tapes uses it rather than starting the Ollama container.

Start the all-in-one runtime in one terminal:

tapes serve

This runs the capture proxy on http://localhost:8080, read API on http://localhost:8081, private ingest API on http://localhost:8082, derive pipeline, and span-embedding pipeline. Seed data and browse it from another terminal:

tapesctl seed --tapes-url http://localhost:8081
tapesctl sessions list --tapes-url http://localhost:8081
tapesctl sessions list

Search individual spans:

tapesctl search "explain the retry logic"

When ready to capture real work, launch a supported agent through the client:

tapesctl start claude --tapes-url http://localhost:8081
# or
tapesctl start opencode --tapes-url http://localhost:8081

tapesctl start launches the agent under a just-in-time capture proxy, routes its provider traffic through it, and ships the captured turns to the server. See Agent integrations for manual and generic-proxy setups.

Next steps