Show HN: Orchid – Local-first record and replay for AI agent debugging

Mario Guerra released Orchid, a zero-instrumentation proxy for local-first debugging of AI agent pipelines. The tool captures API and LLM calls, enabling step-by-step replay and inspection without cloud dependencies or vendor lock-in. It aims to simplify debugging of multi-step agentic systems and non-deterministic LLM test failures.

Orchid Orchestration interactive debugger is a zero-instrumentation proxy that captures every API & LLM call in your agent pipeline, then lets you inspect and replay the entire run locally, step by step. No instrumentation, no vendor lock-in, no cloud dependency. It also provides a visual inspector and MCP server, so you can inspect the session yourself or use your favorite agentic coding IDE to debug your agent runs. I built it because I was tired of debugging agent failures by grepping through logs, and the available AI observability tools all seemed to require intrusive instrumentation and/or sending my prompts and responses to a cloud service. I wanted something that would let me debug agent runs locally, without having to worry about vendor lock-in or data privacy. Orchid is that tool. The call inspection features work extremely well, at least for my use cases, but the replay feature is perhaps more interesting. It makes LLM pipeline testing deterministic without mocking or re-running expensive API calls. Free, self-hosted, runs on your machine or infrastructure: https://github.com/mario-guerra/orchid-trace https://github.com/mario-guerra/orchid-trace Would love feedback from anyone building multi-step agentic systems or struggling with non-deterministic LLM test failures. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660800 Points: 1 Comments: 0