Respan Alternative

Stop debugging regressions.
Start preventing them.

Respan is a powerful debugger for understanding agent failures after they occur. Refine AI is the gate that prevents those failures from reaching production in the first place. These are complementary tools — but if you're choosing one for CI, the choice is clear.

Get started free View docs →

At a glance

Respan Refine AI
CI/CD gate (fails PR) ✗ No ✓ Yes
Primary use case Debugging after failure Preventing failure
Baseline comparison ✗ No ✓ HEAD vs main
Run replay ✓ Excellent ✗ Not included
Auto-enforcement ✗ Manual ✓ Automatic
Agent support ✓ Yes ✓ Yes
Setup time Minutes 5 minutes
Framework-agnostic ✓ Yes ✓ Yes

Debugger vs. gatekeeper

Respan and Refine AI answer different questions. Here's what you're missing if you only have one.

Debugger vs. gatekeeper — different jobs

Respan is excellent for understanding why an agent failed. But it doesn't prevent the regression from reaching production. By the time you're debugging in Respan, the bad PR has already merged. Refine AI is the check that catches it before merge — before users are affected.

No baseline delta comparison

Respan records individual runs in isolation. It doesn't compare this PR's behavior against the main branch baseline. Refine AI's core feature is exactly this delta: "step_count went from 6 to 22 in this PR — FAIL." Without a baseline, you can't detect regressions automatically.

No way to fail a PR

There's no Respan configuration that fails a GitHub check. It's a debugging tool, not an enforcement tool. Refine AI is designed from the ground up as a CI gate — the assertion is the artifact, the PR status is the output.

How Refine AI is different

Prevents, not just debugs

Catch regressions at the PR, before they ship. Respan helps you understand failures; Refine AI stops them.

Baseline delta on every PR

Compare HEAD vs main. See step_count, tool_calls, loop_risk delta for every code change.

Automatic PR blocking

No action required from the team. The check fails, the PR is blocked, the engineer is notified.

CI-native design

Built around the GitHub PR workflow. The output is a check status that gates the merge.

Who each tool is built for

Use Respan if…

  • →You need powerful post-failure debugging and run replay
  • →You want to understand agent decision-making visually
  • →Time-travel debugging is important to your incident workflow

Use Refine AI if…

  • →You want to prevent agent regressions from shipping in the first place
  • →You need automated PR gating with baseline comparison
  • →You want CI to catch behavioral changes at the commit level

Get started in 5 minutes

Add the gate. Stop debugging avoidable regressions.

.github/workflows/agent-regression.yml 
- name: Assert agent behavior
  uses: agentdbg/agentdbg-action@v1
  with:
    baseline: main
    checks: step_count,tool_calls,loop_risk,cost,latency
Read the full setup guide →

Gate the PR. Skip the debug session.

Catch agent regressions before they ship. The best debug session is the one you never have to do.

Add to GitHub Actions