OpenTelemetry Traces Your LLM. It Does Not Fix It.

The DEV community is buzzing about OpenTelemetry standardizing LLM tracing. That is a real win. Spans, traces, semantic conventions for gen AI — all of it matters. I have been watching this space for a while. But I want to say something that production experience has drilled into me. Observability without correction is a dashboard full of problems you are still solving manually. What Tracing Gives You OpenTelemetry for LLMs gives you visibility into: Latency per call Token consumption Span trees across your agent chain Model inputs and outputs at each step That is genuinely useful. I am not dismissing it. But here is what it does not give you: Detection that the output is hallucinated before it reaches your user Automatic retry with a corrected prompt when groundedness fails Cost circuit breakers that fire before your inference bill explodes Safety flags that block a response instead of just logging that it was bad You are still the correction layer. You are the human staring at a Graf