Your agent dashboard is green. The run underneath it is where the work actually broke.

A Cursor agent deleted a software company’s production database and its volume-level backups in nine seconds.

This was late April 2026. The founder, Jer Crane of PocketOS, watched it happen. It is the kind of story that gets passed around because it reads like a warning about how dangerous agents have become, or how badly one vendor failed. That reading misses the more interesting thing, which is that nothing on a normal product dashboard would have seen it coming. An active user, a long session, a healthy pile of chat messages, a feature getting used. All green, right up until the moment the database was gone.

Everything that actually mattered happened inside the run, and that is precisely the part most analytics cannot see. When the user is an agent, the unit of product behavior is becoming the agent run: the work a user handed over, the steps the agent took, the tools it touched, the boundaries it hit, the corrections it got back, and whether anyone accepted the result.

For the first time in the history of software, we can watch the consequences of our decisions land in real time. You used to make a call, ship it, and wait weeks to learn whether it worked. An agent collapses that loop to minutes, and if you get good signal back while it runs, you can shape and steer it mid-flight. Speed is the engine. Analytics is the rudder. A database that vanishes in nine seconds is what happens when you have a powerful engine and no way to steer.

Here’s what’s inside:

• The events that are the new clicks. What to actually count when the user is an agent and the click, the page view, and the session have stopped telling you anything useful.

• Why your traces aren’t your answer. Engineering already has the execution data. Why that’s necessary, not sufficient, and what product still has to build on top of it.

• The difference between a task that finished and a task the user trusted. Reading that one gap is how you tell which workflows have earned more autonomy.

• The starter setup. The three events to ship this week, the full event schema underneath them, and the prompts that turn that schema into instrumentation in your own stack, your corrections into eval cases, and your numbers into a roadmap.

Most teams have filed all of this under engineering telemetry instead of product, and that is exactly why the runs keep going fast in the wrong direction. This is how you get the rudder.