I didn't expect this. I published opensmith yesterday — a local-first LLM pipeline tracer built as an alternative to LangSmith. No cloud. No API key. No account. No data leaving your machine. Just pip install opensmith and you're tracing. And in one day — 600+ downloads. Why I Built This Every time I built an LLM app, I had to: Create a LangSmith account Set environment variables Send my traces to someone else's cloud Pray my data was safe For production enterprise apps, healthcare tools, or anything privacy-sensitive — that's a dealbreaker. So I asked: what if observability just worked locally? Why Observability Matters You cannot improve what you cannot see. When your LLM pipeline breaks, you need to know: 🔍 Which prompt caused the bad output? ⏱️ Where is the latency spike? 💸 Which call is burning tokens unnecessarily? 🔁 Which chain step is failing silently? Without tracing, you're flying blind. LangSmith solves this — but at the cost of your data going to their servers.…