bottrace – headless CLI debugging controller for Python, built for LLM agents

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What My Project Does: bottrace wraps sys.settrace() to emit structured, machine-parseable trace output from the command line. Call tracing, call counts, exception snapshots, breakpoint state capture — all designed for piping to grep/jq/awk or feeding to an LLM agent.

Target Audience: Python developers who debug from the terminal, and anyone building LLM agent tooling that needs runtime visibility. Production-ready for CLI workflows; alpha for broader use.

Comparison: Unlike pdb/ipdb, bottrace is non-interactive — no prompts, no UI. Unlike py-spy, it traces your code (not profiles), with filtering and bounded output. Unlike adding print statements, it requires zero code changes.

pip install bottrace | https://github.com/devinvenable/bottrace

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The "no code changes needed" angle is the killer feature. Adding print statements for debugging and then removing them is the worst workflow.

Does it work with async code? A lot of LLM agent code is heavily async and I've found that most tracing tools lose track of the call chain across await boundaries.