Lightrun’s argument is that coding agents reason about source code while incidents happen in running processes, so an agent asked to fix production is working blind. The platform captures live runtime state — variables, call paths, execution flow — from services under load and makes it queryable by both engineers and agents.
For incident response, that shortens the loop between an alert and a verified root cause, because the investigating engineer no longer redeploys with extra logging to reproduce the failure. The platform handles alert triage and proposes root cause with the runtime evidence attached.
Instrumenting production carries real risk, so evaluation should cover performance overhead, data redaction and which environments are in scope. Teams under change-control regimes need to establish how runtime capture is approved before rollout.
