# Ian Johnson praises swarm trajectory visualization tool

> Original title: this is a tour de force of swarm trajectory visualization

- Source: Ian Johnson
- Published: 2026-10-31T17:42:50.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/ek7ccaqa90si3ep8enx5r1w07
- Original: https://x.com/enjalot/status/2116586710272221477

## Summary

Ian Johnson calls a swarm trajectory visualization a tour de force. The post's background from @strickvl describes a collector that records agent filesystem reads and writes, inter-agent messages and traces, plus a viewer with several modes for inspecting swarm runs.

## Post

this is a tour de force of swarm trajectory visualization

## Quoted post @strickvl

> Seeing more and more people writing about swarm observability so thought I'd post some of the work I'd been doing to think this through.
> 
> I built some tools to help AI engineers work with agent swarm traces and other signals. Specifically:
> 
> - a collector that tracks everything the agents in a swarm are doing, from filesystem writes and reads to inter-agent messages to traditional traces that you're probably familiar with
> - a viewer with a bunch of different modes (see the rest of the 🧵 below for some glimpses of these) to help someone trying to understand how a swarm behaved either during or post-run
> - a simple agent ('hodhod') that comes with some deterministic tools to help quickly try to slide and dice the huge volume of data recorded by the collector, which can try to help understand how things worked (or where they failed)
> 
> Today I'll focus more on the viewer component as it's easiest to understand...

https://x.com/strickvl/status/2116548551144767981