Observe
The SDK records each LLM call as an event — hashes, token counts, costs, model names, and timing. Events are metadata only: no prompt or response text, no PII. See Privacy & data for exactly what leaves your process. From this traffic Visceral reconstructs how your agent actually runs — which calls depend on which, and where the same work happens over and over.Prove (the gate)
Before Visceral changes anything, a proposed optimization has to pass the gate: Visceral must be able to demonstrate that the cheaper call produces an output-equivalent result for the task at hand. An optimization that can’t clear the gate is never applied. This is what makes Visceral a performance engine rather than a router — it doesn’t gamble on “probably fine.”Optimize
Only optimizations that clear the gate ship. And because Visceral fails open, a backend outage or a degraded path doesn’t stall or break your agent — it simply runs as if Visceral weren’t there.The two invariants — never change the agent’s output and fail open — are
contracts, not aspirations. Everything else in the system is built to keep them true.