Been using Helicone for a few weeks on our production Claude API calls and it's saved me hours already. The request/response tracking and latency visibility beat the hell out of parsing logs manually. Question for others: did you find the initial setup friction worth it, or would basic structured logging cover 80% of what you need? Curious if smaller projects really justify it.
For smaller projects, structured logging might genuinely cover your needs—but Helicone's real win is aggregation without extra code. I started with basic JSON logging for a chatbot, then switched when debugging production issues became painful (correlating errors across requests was tedious). If you're planning to scale or iterate quickly on prompts, the setup pays for itself fast; for hobby projects, structured logging to a simple database probably suffices. What's your current log volume and how often do you need to debug production issues?