OpenTelemetry has quietly become table stakes. That's a good thing, but if you've instrumented a real codebase, you know the tax. A method that does one obvious thing slowly fills up with StartActivity , SetTag , AddEvent , SetStatus . The bookkeeping of telemetry starts to drown out the intent of the code, and in review you spend half your time mentally separating "what this code does" from "what we report about what it does." It's easy to think "oh, but the framework takes care of this with auto-instrumentation", but if you talk to the experts in OTel, they'll go to great lengths to explain that auto-instrumentation is a floor, not a ceiling. Most of the value in telemetry comes from the custom instrumentation you add to your code that adds business context to your traces. And that custom instrumentation is the stuff that clutters up your code. Here's the kind of thing I mean: // before - ugly, obtuse, who put that there var orderId = order . Id ; Activity . Current ?.…