Observability
Also: AI observability
The ability to see what your AI system is doing in production — what inputs it received, what it responded, how much it cost, how long it took, and where it went wrong. Without observability, debugging production AI is guesswork. With it, you can spot when Claude's responses drift in quality, catch expensive prompt mistakes early, and diagnose specific failures. Usually implemented through logging, dashboards, and AI-specific monitoring tools.
In practice
Your Claude-powered tool starts giving worse answers after a prompt change. Without observability you're guessing why. With it, you have logs of every input and output, latency metrics, error rates, and alerts that fired when quality dropped. Observability is the instrumentation that tells you what's actually happening inside your AI system in production.