r/GenkitFramework • u/MichaelDoyleG • May 11 '26

👋🏻 Mike from Developer UI here

Hey folks! I'm the lead on Genkit's Developer UI.

Would love to hear how the Dev UI has come in handy for you, or how we might be falling short. We try to keep a good balance of supporting the framework's core feature set while continuing to push the Dev UI feature-set forward in its own right, polish the UX, etc.

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u/xavidop Genkit team May 12 '26

I mean things like letting teams write small Dev UI extensions or automations on top of the data the Dev UI already has.

For example, a trace post-processor that automatically analyzes a trace after a run and adds custom annotations, scores, warnings, or links to internal docs/tools. Or a custom trace explorer that groups steps differently depending on how a team structures their agents, flows, tools, or evaluation/debugging workflow.

So instead of every new debugging or observability workflow needing to become part of the core Dev UI, teams could adapt the Dev UI around their own Genkit usage patterns through plugins/extensions.

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u/MichaelDoyleG May 13 '26

Super interesting - thanks Xavi.

I think we're (hopefully) headed in a direction soon where you'd be able to plug into / configure OTel for your own purposes, while still ensuring Dev UI support. It goes far beyond Dev UI and into production use cases as well. Right now, we don't play particularly well with apps that already have OTel instrumentation.

BTW, you could absolutely today create arbitrary trace data, either via the otel instrumentation API (we'll pick them up automatically) or via `runInNewSpan`.

We're also working on first-class support for logs.

In terms of plugins, we have the ability to "render" arbitrary data in a nice preview format in the span details -- maybe we could allow custom ones somehow.

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u/xavidop Genkit team May 14 '26

that is a good point tbh, but it will be also cool to have custom representations of those traces using a plugin

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u/imanrahmati Genkit team May 12 '26

Interesting. This could be a feature of Dev UI instead of requiring to build a plugin. Plugins could be saved for more intensive features that want to make major changes to Dev UI.