Hi everyone, it’s been a couple months since the last changelog, here is an update on where we’re at.
I’m Brian, Replay’s co-founder, former CTO, and new CEO. Jason is stepping down as CEO and transitioning to an advisory role. I’m extremely grateful to Jason for all the work he’s done over the last four years.
Replay’s devtools have not had the impact we wanted. We built our devtools to help developers understand any bug no matter its complexity. I’m really proud of what we’ve built and all the feedback we’ve gotten for how much Replay has helped you. However, Chrome’s devtools are also great, and they’re really efficient for solving most of the problems which frontend developers run into day to day. We’ve ended up in a niche as the best tool for solving the hardest frontend bugs, but not as a tool which is needed regularly.
We’ll continue to support Replay’s devtools so you can keep using them to solve the hardest bugs. We’re not focusing on incremental improvements to the devtools or the browser, however, and some features we’ve previously discussed for these no longer have an ETA. I’m sorry if this impacts you, please reach out with any questions and I’m sure we can find a good path forward.
This might seem glum, but it's actually an incredible opportunity. Replay’s core technology gives complete observability into the software we are all building. Everything we want to know about this software – its behavior, performance, and so on – can be recovered from a recording created with minimal overhead. The recording is in essence a database of the application's execution, which is completely different from what Chrome's devtools et al provide. Using Replay's devtools we are querying this database by hand, but anything we do with the devtools can be automated.
By statically analyzing recordings we can streamline or eliminate many development tasks. This works especially well by leveraging generative AI, which dovetails well with static analysis. Analysis is great at making tasks simpler, and AIs are great at doing simple tasks.
There is huge potential here, which we haven’t been able to look into because we've been so focused on building a product. To effectively explore this potential we're doing two things.
First, by shifting focus away from our product we can focus on demos, which are much easier and faster to build. Over the coming weeks we'll be showing off a series of demos for what Replay can do. Some of these demos are major changes to the devtools, and some go in completely different directions, but all of them leverage our core technology to do things that seem impossible.
Second, going forward we need to listen to you better. Demos are neat, but they’re only useful if they address important problems. We want to fix the thorniest problems you run into day to day, and we want to work closely with you to make sure we’re fixing these problems for real. When we're convinced we have an effective solution for an important problem, we can turn that into a product.
Our first demo is for full stack debugging, see this blog post for an explanation and video. We believe that one of the main challenges of web development is understanding the interactions between the frontend and the backend services it talks to, and between different backend microservices. With Replay we can separately record and debug the frontend and the different backend services (with our alpha Node.js recorder), but by combining these recordings – like joining two databases – we can debug the complete application. We can trace a request over its entire lifecycle from frontend to backend and back to the frontend again, and quickly track down problems originating in any service.
If you agree that full stack development is difficult, let us know! We want to understand the best ways we can make it easier. If full stack development is a piece of cake but there are better ways we can help, let us know! Join our discord and say hi, reach me directly at hi@replay.io, or fill out our contact form and I’ll be in touch. Full stack debugging is the first of several awesome demos we’ll be showing off over the next several weeks but we’d love to talk now.
