View-oriented Conversation Compiler for Agent Trace Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces VCC, a compiler that transforms complex agent JSON logs into structured views, improving analysis quality and efficiency in agent trace analysis.

Contribution

VCC provides a novel compilation approach that creates multiple structured views from raw agent logs, enhancing analysis and context engineering capabilities.

Findings

Replacing raw JSONL with VCC views increases model pass rates.

VCC reduces reflector token consumption by 50-66%.

Structured views lead to more concise learned memory.

Abstract

Agent traces carry increasing analytical value in agentic systems and context engineering, yet most prior work treats conversation format as a trivial implementation detail. Modern agent conversations, however, contain deeply structured content, including nested tool calls and results, chain-of-thought reasoning blocks, sub-agent invocations, context-window compaction boundaries, and harness-injected system directives, whose complexity far exceeds that of simple user-assistant exchanges. Feeding such traces to a reflector or other analytical mechanism in plain text, JSON, YAML, or via grep can materially degrade analysis quality. This paper presents VCC (View-oriented Conversation Compiler), a compiler (lex, parse, IR, lower, emit) that transforms raw agent JSONL logs into a family of structured views: a full view (lossless transcript serving as the canonical line-number coordinate system), a user-interface (UI) view (reconstructing the interaction as the user actually perceived it), and an adaptive view (a structure-preserving projection governed by a relevance predicate). In a context-engineering experiment on AppWorld, replacing only the reflector's input format, from raw JSONL to VCC-compiled views, leads to higher pass rates across all three model configurations tested, while cutting reflector token consumption by half to two-thirds and producing more concise learned memory. These results suggest that message format functions as infrastructure for context engineering, not as an incidental implementation choice.