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Deskmate/Riva: Agent Observability
Explore local AI agent execution and observability. Learn how to monitor system actions, understand failures, and manage resource usage with tools like Deskmate and Riva.
AI agents are getting better at taking action, but most local setups still behave like black boxes. Once an agent can run commands, open ports, or spin up background processes, the real challenge isn’t intelligence, it’s knowing what’s actually happening on your machine.
In this demo-driven talk, I’ll show how I’ve been experimenting with local-first AI agents that execute real system actions, and why I had to build observability alongside execution. I’ll demo two open-source tools: Deskmate, a local execution agent, and Riva, a local monitoring layer that makes agent behavior visible. We’ll look at real examples of agent workflows, failure modes, resource usage, and how visibility changes how much you can trust autonomy.
The goal is not to pitch a framework, but to share lessons learned from running agents locally and open up a discussion on what responsible agent tooling should look like.