I Built a Local-First Alternative to LangSmith After Spending $200 Debugging a Pipeline I Couldn't See | Shivnath Tathe

Last month I spent $200 on OpenAI tokens debugging a RAG pipeline. I had no idea which step was eating my budget. LangSmith would have helped — but I didn't want to send my prompts to a cloud service just to debug locally. So I built opensmith. What is opensmith? A local-first LLM pipeline tracer. Zero cloud. Zero setup. Everything stays on your machine. pip install opensmith How it works One decorator: from opensmith import trace @trace(tags=["rag", "production"]) def pipeline(query: str): docs = retrieve(query) return generate(docs, query) That's it. opensmith captures: Function name, inputs, outputs Latency in milliseconds Token usage per step Cost estimate Errors with full stack trace Parent-child relationships for nested calls The dashboard opensmith ui Opens at localhost:7823. Live WebSocket updates, search, filters, charts. No account needed. vs LangSmith LangSmith opensmith Setup Cloud account pip install Data Sent to cloud 100% local Framework Best with LangChain Any Python Cost Free then paid Free forever What's new in v0.1.5 Token budget alerts — never blow your API budget again: @trace(token_budget=1000) def expensive_pipeline(): ... # Prints: ⚠ expensive_pipeline used 1,247 tokens (budget: 1,000) CLI trace filters: opensmith traces --q rag --status err --tags production Auto port detection — if 7823 is taken, opensmith finds the next free port automatically. opensmith init — creates a starter config: opensmith init # Creates opensmith.json in current directory Autopatch — zero code changes from opensmith import autopatch autopatch(only=["openai", "qdrant"]) Supported: OpenAI, Anthropic, LiteLLM, Qdrant, ChromaDB, Pinecone. Stats after 5 days 1,500+ PyPI downloads. 16 GitHub stars. Growing organically. GitHub: https://github.com/shivnathtathe/opensmith If this saves you time, a ⭐ helps others discover it. Thank you for 1,500+ downloads 🙏 What would you add to a local-first tracing tool?