Tracepress

Tracepress is a local-first Rust runtime for observing AI-agent traffic, measuring explicit and provider-managed context, and evaluating bounded context-reduction candidates. Its operational path is designed to fail open: observation or analysis failures must not prevent the original request from being forwarded.

The workspace includes an authenticated local IPC layer, a single-writer SQLite store, provider and context analysis, an HTTP proxy, an explicit source-tool boundary, and a read-only Dioxus Observatory. Analysis records metadata and measurements rather than prompt, response, tool-result, credential, or raw provider-body content.

Tracepress is pre-1.0 research software. Active reductions are opt-in and each experiment document states what its evidence does and does not establish.

Requirements

• Rust 1.88 or newer (the workspace's minimum supported Rust version)
• Dioxus CLI only when building the Observatory web assets

The pinned toolchain in rust-toolchain.toml is the normal development toolchain. CI separately checks the minimum supported version.

Quick start

Build the workspace and inspect the CLI:

cargo build --workspace --all-features --locked
cargo run -p tracepress-cli --bin tracepress -- --help

Initialize local state, validate it, and run an agent through Tracepress:

cargo run -p tracepress-cli --bin tracepress -- init
cargo run -p tracepress-cli --bin tracepress -- doctor
cargo run -p tracepress-cli --bin tracepress -- run --help

Tracepress stores local runtime state outside the repository. Set TRACEPRESS_HOME to an isolated directory for development or tests that must not inspect normal user state.

To launch the read-only Observatory with synthetic data, first build its web assets and then start the loopback-only server:

cd crates/tracepress-dashboard
dx build --platform web --release
cd ../..
cargo run -p tracepress-cli --bin tracepress -- ui --fixture

See docs/observatory.md for the operational dashboard, API, privacy model, and larger synthetic fixture.

Development

CONTRIBUTING.md explains the contribution workflow. The exact local equivalents of CI, coverage, dependency-policy, feature-combination, fuzzing, and mutation checks live in docs/development.md. The ordered maintenance backlog and explicitly deferred work are recorded in docs/next-steps.md.

Architecture and experiment contracts are under docs/design/ and reproducible research summaries are under docs/research/. Reports must state their evidence boundary; local byte reduction is not automatically evidence of provider-token, cache, cost, quality, or end-to-end task improvement.

Security

Tracepress handles local credentials and potentially sensitive agent traffic. Please read SECURITY.md before reporting a vulnerability and do not put secrets, prompt content, or exploit details in a public issue.

License

Workspace packages declare MIT OR Apache-2.0. The repository must include the corresponding license text files before a public distribution or release artifact is published.