[HN Gopher] Show HN: Time travel debugging AI for more reliable ...
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Show HN: Time travel debugging AI for more reliable vibe coding
Hi HN, I'm the CEO at https://replay.io. We've been building a time
travel debugger for web apps for several years now (previous HN
post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28539247) and are
combining our tech with AI to automate the debugging process. AIs
are really good at writing code but really bad at debugging -- it's
amazing to use Claude to prompt an app into existence, and pretty
frustrating when that app doesn't work right and Claude is all
thumbs fixing the problem. The basic reason for this is a lack of
context. People can use devtools to understand what's going on in
the app, but AIs struggle here. With a recording of the app its
behavior becomes a giant database for querying using RAG. We've
been giving Claude tools to explore and understand what happens in
a Replay recording, from basic stuff like seeing console messages
to more advanced analysis of React, control dependencies, and
dataflow. For now this is behind a chat API
(https://blog.replay.io/the-nut-api). We recently launched Nut
(https://nut.new) as an open source project which uses this tech
for building apps through prompting (vibe coding), similar to e.g.
https://bolt.new and https://v0.dev. We want Nut to fix bugs
effectively (cracking nuts, so to speak) and are working to make it
a reliable tool for building complete production grade apps. It's
been pretty neat to see Nut fixing bugs that totally stump the AI
otherwise. Each of the problems below has a short video but you can
also load the associated project and try it yourself. - Exception
thrown from a catch block unmounts the entire app:
https://nut.new/problem/57a0b3d7-42ed-4db0-bc7d-9dfec8e3b3a5 - A
settings button doesn't work because its modal component isn't
always created:
https://nut.new/problem/bae8c208-31a1-4ec1-960f-3afa18514674 - An
icon is really tiny due to sizing constraints imposed by other
elements:
https://nut.new/problem/9bb4e5f6-ea21-4b4c-b969-9e7ff4f00f5b -
Loading doesn't finish due to a problem initializing responsive UI
state: https://nut.new/problem/486bc534-0c0e-4b2a-bb64-bfe985e623f4
- Infinite rendering loop caused by a missing useCallback:
https://nut.new/problem/496f6944-419d-4f38-91b4-20d2aa698a5e Nut
is completely free. You get some free uses or can add an API key,
and we're also offering unlimited free access for folks who can
give us feedback we'll use to improve Nut. Email me at hi@replay.io
if you're interested. For now Nut is best suited for building
frontends but we'll be rolling out more full stack features in the
next few weeks. I'd love to know what you think!
Author : bhackett
Score : 51 points
Date : 2025-03-04 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nut.new)
(TXT) w3m dump (nut.new)
| zaptrem wrote:
| Just letting you know the about page has black text on a black
| background
| xeonmc wrote:
| Can't expect too much reliability from the result of vibe
| coding.
| bhackett wrote:
| Thanks for the report! The about page is fixed now when looking
| at it in dark mode.
| itishappy wrote:
| Black text on black background is also used on the problems
| page, and the background only extends downwards one page
| length.
| bhackett wrote:
| Thanks! These are both fixed now. Clearly we need to do
| some more dark mode testing...
| itishappy wrote:
| I now see only a giant nut when viewing the main landing
| page.
|
| Edit: Now everything is made of buttons.
| bhackett wrote:
| Hmm, strange, it's loading alright for me but we've had a
| couple reports of rendering problems. If you have a
| chance to file an issue here
| https://github.com/replayio/nut.new/issues I'd appreciate
| it, thanks!
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| These are the results you can expect from someone who says they
| are 'vibe coding'.
| nenadg wrote:
| Looks fun and it does create something -
| https://nut.new/chat/prince-of-persia-platform-game
|
| I couldn't start the game though, but it seems runnable given
| some debugging. Great work!
| JackYoustra wrote:
| Hm, the link isn't working for me
| bhackett wrote:
| Thanks! Unfortunately the chat links aren't shareable yet.
| We're planning on adding this within the next couple weeks
| along with the other full stack features (database integration
| and easy deployment).
| krat0sprakhar wrote:
| Can you share the prompt you used to generate this game? (given
| chats aren't sharable)
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Nut looks like a fork of Bolt, how does Nut differ?
| bhackett wrote:
| Yes, Nut is a fork of https://bolt.diy and like bolt.diy you
| can add your own API key and use it as much as you want (Nut is
| hosted though so you don't have to set anything else up).
|
| The improvements we're making are under the hood. When you ask
| Nut to fix a bug it should do a much better job -- we record
| the app's behavior and analyze it so the AI has context for the
| changes it needs to make.
|
| We've also added some UI to approve or reject the changes the
| AI makes. For now we're using this to gather feedback so we can
| improve Nut, but down the line we'll also refund the user any
| credits when they reject changes -- you shouldn't have to pay
| when the AI screws up, a big issue with these tools (and vibe
| coding in general).
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Interesting, I'll check it out. Any plans to open source Nut
| like Bolt is?
| bhackett wrote:
| Yeah, the source is here:
| https://github.com/replayio/nut.new
|
| We'll continue to keep it open source as we develop it.
| PetrBrzyBrzek wrote:
| If anyone is wondering why it looks like Bolt, it's because it's
| using Bolt.DIY, an open-source fork of Bolt
| (https://github.com/stackblitz-labs/bolt.diy). The catch is that
| it's still using WebContainers from StackBlitz, so it's not
| really possible to run it commercially. You need to get rid of
| WebContainers and find something different.
| bhackett wrote:
| Thanks, yeah we're really thankful to StackBlitz for open
| sourcing the early version of Bolt.new and to the Bolt.diy
| community for continuing to develop it.
|
| We don't have a commercial offering yet and are planning to
| migrate off WebContainers for the upcoming full stack features
| -- WebContainers show their limits pretty quickly in a full
| stack context (e.g. CORS issues) and we need observability into
| the server side of the app for full stack debugging.
|
| Regardless, our interests here are only lightly commercial.
| We're not really developing Nut to drive revenue but to help us
| develop the debugging API and push forward the SOTA for AI
| development as effectively as we can. That API is what we want
| to sell.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| What is vibe coding?
| yoavm wrote:
| It's when an AI writes the code for you.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The way I understood it: Cobbling a program together by simply
| prompting AI assistants over and over, blindly using the
| generated code, and repeating until it barely approaches
| satisfying the requirements. Not worrying about things like
| correctness, proper design, code cleanliness,
| understandability, performance, code size, security, data
| protection, maintainability, or even bugs unless they
| catastrophically stop the user from running the program.
|
| I really hope this doesn't actually catch on in "real"
| engineering, beside as a meme joke.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Judging by how many people blindly posted Stackoverflow
| answers, there will be a significant amount of code 'written'
| this way.
| bhackett wrote:
| Yes, that's all true. Even so, vibe coding empowers anyone
| who can write clear instructions to build software, but the
| limits of the technology get hit pretty quickly by non-
| developers and they have little recourse. This blog post
| https://addyo.substack.com/p/the-70-problem-hard-truths-
| abou... is a great overview.
|
| The tech will get better and better (I couldn't imagine we'd
| be doing this a year ago) but to be truly useful it has to
| reliably produce reasonably well engineered code, and
| effective debugging is a key piece of that.
| ge96 wrote:
| It's the infinite improbability drive in hitchhiker's guide
|
| would be funny though, who produces the result faster a Fiver
| or an AI in a loop for a day
|
| It spits out urls to sites and sends em to Fiver QA people,
| take a shot every time the app doesn't work
|
| Wonder the cost effectiveness, have a randomizer start
| producing/hosting code auto submit it to Product Hunt
| PStamatiou wrote:
| Here's where it all started:
| https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
| webdever wrote:
| > it's amazing to use Claude to prompt an app into existence, and
| pretty frustrating when that app doesn't work right and Claude is
| all thumbs fixing the problem.
|
| Such an in interesting sentence. App that doesn't work doesn't
| seem like it's yet come into existence.
|
| This has been my (limited) experience so far. I haven't been able
| to get an AI/LLM to help me build an app. Even React apps it
| fails at. I have been able to get an LLM to help with coding
| questions similar to Stack Overflow questions though (though not
| always)
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(page generated 2025-03-04 23:00 UTC)