Conversations
Ask TraceX about production in plain language, about data, code, logs, errors and deploys, and get answers with the sources they came from.
Not every question is an incident. Often someone just needs to know something about production: how many signups came in yesterday, why one order failed, where in the code a value gets set. Normally that means finding the engineer who knows, or writing SQL against a database you don’t know well.
Conversations is a chat with TraceX about one project. Ask what you’d ask a senior engineer who can see everything:
- Why did order 48213 fail?
- How many signups did we get yesterday, by plan?
- What changed in the payments service this week?
- Where is the refund state set in the code?
- Which customers hit
card_declinedmore than three times today?
How it answers
Section titled “How it answers”TraceX picks the right sources for the question: it runs read-only queries, searches logs and errors, reads code and your knowledge base. Then it answers with the sources it used, so you can check the query it ran or the file it read. Follow-up questions keep the context, so you can drill down: “and by country?”.
The same safety rules as investigations apply: queries are checked and read-only, secrets are masked before anything reaches an AI model, and every read is in the data access log.
Questions vs. investigations
Section titled “Questions vs. investigations”| Use Conversations when… | Start an investigation when… |
|---|---|
| you want a fact, a number or an explanation | something is broken and you want the root cause |
| the answer fits in a few sentences | you want evidence, a fix and a report to share |
| you’re exploring | the result should go back to a ticket, thread or customer |
TraceX will suggest an investigation when a question needs a longer look.
Other places to ask
Section titled “Other places to ask”- Slack: mention @TraceX in a thread (Slack).
- Terminal:
tracex -c "question"(CLI). - Claude, Cursor and other AI tools: over MCP (AI coding tools).
Questions from all of these appear in Conversations and count toward your plan’s chat messages.
Tips for better answers
Section titled “Tips for better answers”- Name the thing. “Order 48213” beats “a recent order”.
- Give a time range. “Yesterday”, “since the 09:00 deploy”, “last 7 days”.
- Say what you’ll do with it. “I need this for a customer reply” gets a different answer from “I need the query”.
- Teach it once. If TraceX misreads a table, add a note to the company profile
(“
orders.totalis in dollars”) and it applies to everyone.