Hi, I’m Matt, and today I’m announcing Wax (in preview).
Wax is an embeddable programming language designed to make any moment in a program’s history reproducible anywhere. This goes a few steps beyond typical time travel debugging: Wax is built to record its own execution in production, with performance and storage overhead low enough for that to be practical.
Once you have a recording, you can do much more than just replay it. You can change the program and run it again with your edits, query its heap like a database, inspect state you never thought to log, and replay it byte for byte across pretty much any modern OS or CPU. Recordings are also directly inspectable by coding agents, letting them reason from what actually happened instead of source code and logs.
I spent a big chunk of my career in games, where I kept running into bugs reported on platforms and hardware I didn’t have easy access to. Reproducing exactly what someone saw could mean chasing down some tiny difference in hardware, drivers, build configuration, or whatever else happened to matter. Usually the bug report was little more than a stack trace, screenshot, or “it’s broken.”
What I always wanted instead was the actual program in the state the user experienced it. I wanted something I could trivially bring back to my machine, rewind, inspect, and investigate exactly what happened after the fact. I wanted the bug report to be the bug. Wax is my answer to that.
Hi, I’m Matt, and today I’m announcing Wax (in preview).
Wax is an embeddable programming language designed to make any moment in a program’s history reproducible anywhere. This goes a few steps beyond typical time travel debugging: Wax is built to record its own execution in production, with performance and storage overhead low enough for that to be practical.
Once you have a recording, you can do much more than just replay it. You can change the program and run it again with your edits, query its heap like a database, inspect state you never thought to log, and replay it byte for byte across pretty much any modern OS or CPU. Recordings are also directly inspectable by coding agents, letting them reason from what actually happened instead of source code and logs.
I spent a big chunk of my career in games, where I kept running into bugs reported on platforms and hardware I didn’t have easy access to. Reproducing exactly what someone saw could mean chasing down some tiny difference in hardware, drivers, build configuration, or whatever else happened to matter. Usually the bug report was little more than a stack trace, screenshot, or “it’s broken.”
What I always wanted instead was the actual program in the state the user experienced it. I wanted something I could trivially bring back to my machine, rewind, inspect, and investigate exactly what happened after the fact. I wanted the bug report to be the bug. Wax is my answer to that.