Thorsten Ball: Real-World Agent Debugging via 'Runbooks' — Teams Sending AI Agents Long Markdown Documents to Analyze Production Issues

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Thorsten Ball described in Joy & Curiosity #86 how his team debugs production database issues by sending 'runbooks' (long Markdown documents created by agents) to each other, pasting them into Amp, and having the agent compile reports analyzing metrics and data points to identify root causes. Ball calls this 'a well-grounded, realistic portrayal of what it looks like to use agents in the first half of 2026' — not replacing engineers but augmenting their diagnostic speed when they can only see symptoms, not causes.