Debugging Agents: The New Agent Debug Panel in JetBrains
Agent work is invisible by default. You start a session, the agent runs, and you see the result — or you do not. If the agent fails, you have a conversation log but not a workflow trace. The new agent debug panel in JetBrains (June 2, 2026) changes this by exposing a chronological event log: every decision point, every tool call, every plan handoff, every error. This is to agents what stack traces are to synchronous code.
Why visibility is not luxury; it is necessity
When a regular program crashes, you get a stack trace: line numbers, function names, the exact state at failure. When an agent fails, you previously got silence or a cryptic error. The debug panel bridges that gap. It shows you what the agent was thinking, what tools it tried, in what order, and what happened when each tool returned.
This visibility is essential for orchestrated workflows. If you are running three agents in parallel, each calling different tools, and one fails mysteriously, the debug panel lets you trace the failure to a specific tool call, a specific agent, at a specific timestamp. Without this, diagnosing parallel agent failures is guesswork.
What the debug panel exposes
- Event chronology: A chronological log of every event in the agent session, sorted by timestamp. Events include: planning steps, tool discovery, tool invocation, tool results, and handoffs between agents.
- Tool call details: For each tool call, the debug panel shows the tool name, input parameters, and output. If a tool returns an error, the error is visible inline.
How this changes troubleshooting workflows
Before the debug panel, troubleshooting a failed agent session meant: check the final error, re-run the session with more verbose logging, or ask the agent to explain what it did. All of these were slow and error-prone. Now, you can click into the debug panel and immediately see where things went wrong.
This also enables training. When you show a team member how an agent session works, instead of describing it verbally, you can pull up the debug panel and walk through the events chronologically. The panel becomes a teaching tool, not just a diagnostic one.
Qualifying sources
Primary source: GitHub Changelog, Introducing Copilot CLI and agentic capabilities enhancements in JetBrains IDEs (published June 2, 2026).
Debug panel features and visibility vary by IDE version and agent implementation. Consult the JetBrains marketplace and GitHub documentation for current status.