> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.usehone.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# What is Hone

> Hone is an observability and self-improvement platform for AI agents. Instrument your agents once, and turn real conversations into intent signals, rule violations, and failure patterns.

Hone watches your AI agents in production and tells you what your evals never will. Traditional monitoring can report that a span took 3.2 seconds. Hone reads the actual conversation and reports that the user asked the same question three times, grew frustrated, abandoned the session, and which tool call sent things sideways.

The loop is simple to describe and hard to fake: **observe your agents, distill the signal, and act on it.** Every conversation your agents have becomes evidence that your agents can get better every day.

## The three layers

<CardGroup cols={3}>
  <Card title="Observability" icon="chart-line">
    Latency, cost, success rate, error captures, and a per-request trace log across every agent you run.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Conversation intelligence" icon="magnifying-glass-chart">
    Mined intent clusters, rule (SOP) compliance, natural-language search, and scheduled alerts drawn from real transcripts.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Self-improvement" icon="wand-magic-sparkles">
    Prioritized, evidence-backed suggestions that turn surfaced issues into concrete changes for your agent.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## How the signal flows

Your agent emits telemetry to Hone the moment a session starts and every time a turn or tool call completes. Hone normalizes that stream, stores it for analytics, and runs classifiers over the raw text:

<Steps>
  <Step title="Instrument">
    Wrap your agent turns with the Conversations SDK, or wrap an MCP server so every tool, resource, and prompt call is captured automatically. No agent framework is off-limits.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Ingest">
    Sessions and events land at the ingestion API. Events form a tree: a turn is a parent, and the tool calls it triggers point back to it with `parent_id`.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Distill">
    Hone clusters intents, judges responses against your written rules, and aggregates latency, cost, and error signals into dashboards you can query.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Improve">
    Those signals feed prioritized suggestions, so the work of making your agent better is scoped for you rather than discovered by accident.
  </Step>
</Steps>

## Start here

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Quickstart" icon="rocket" href="/quickstart">
    Get your first event visible in Hone in under five minutes, with Python and TypeScript examples.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Data handling" icon="shield-halved" href="/data-governance">
    How to keep user data pseudonymous, allowlist metadata, and redact sensitive content before it leaves your app.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

<Note>
  Hone is built to be provider-neutral. Any large language model, any framework, any orchestration layer. If your agent can make an HTTPS request, it can report to Hone.
</Note>