Arize Phoenix showing 1 Hermes trace: the agent span, 2 model calls on Qwen3.8 Flash Next, and 1 tool call, with my question as the input and the answer as the output.

Weekday Judge, Weekend Judge, and Now a Microscope

BLUF (bottom line up front): For a few weekends now I’ve been grading my own AI. A local model judges it every night of the week, and I judge it by hand every weekend. This weekend 2 talks from the AI Engineer conference said out loud what my grading had already been telling me, and I turned what they said into code the same day, not the same month. I also opened up my traces, so now I can follow every question from the words I typed to the answer the model gave, step by step, tool by tool. Weekday judge, weekend judge, and now a microscope :-) ...

November 8, 2026 · 9 min · Fabian Williams