Show HN: Time travel debugging AI for more reliable vibe coding (opens in new tab)

You can replace "Claude" with any WYSIWYG no-code solution from back in the day like Dreamweaver or whatever and it's basically the same.

I know it's much more powerful than that tool was, but the experience described is similar between both

lol agreed, also I’m of the opinion that if you want a working app it’s much more frustrating to debug a heap of code generated by an AI than it is to build yourself (maybe with the help of AI, if you really need it). at least with the latter if you really built it yourself you understand all the components (to a certain abstraction point at least)

I've made a lot of apps with claude.e.g I made a pretty complex swiftui app recently even though I don't know swift. Usually you have to help Claude debug them and sometimes point it in the right direction.

The first pass often executes but the "thumbs" come in when you fix corner cases or iterate on it.

This is the worst kind of pedantry. There is now code in a text file that wasn't there before. It doesn't really matter to me if they code came from human fingers, an auto generator tool, an LLM or a ouija board. It looks like written code and it compiles like written code - it's written code. You can rightly criticise the use of LLMs in many ways but it is more useful to focus on the actual reasons they cause harm than to set red lines over language.

Exactly my annoying exert as well. LLMs are good at debugging not writing code.

It’s just a statistical rubber duck, “what other obvious (common) things haven’t I thought about yet Mr duck?”

My counter:

My 5 year old is recreated duck hunt with almost zero assistance in an hour.

I helped with the copy paste.

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.

Yeah, we allow importing projects so you can fix bugs you've encountered elsewhere, but we want to streamline the app building process and the UX used in v0/Bolt etc is already really well done. We want this app building to be more reliable though, it's easy to hit bugs that prevent progression.

We're also interested in using our API with MCP so that e.g. Cursor could be used to fix bugs you're seeing locally, and plan to explore that angle before long.

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.

Here's where it all started: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

An even lazier form of LLM assisted coding where you blindly spam the tab key without even taking the bare minimum amount of time reviewing the garbage that it's busy outputting.

Karpathy "coined" the term and I absolutely hate it. It's up there with "asshat" and "awesome sauce" for profoundly stupid terms.

It's truthiness for software. It doesn't matter if the code is correct, as long as it "feels" correct.

It's when an AI writes the code for you.

Well, it can be both. This post https://blog.replay.io/the-nut-api is the best technical overview of the API and discusses several examples.

Can’t expect too much reliability from the result of vibe coding.

These are the results you can expect from someone who says they are 'vibe coding'.

Thanks for the report! The about page is fixed now when looking at it in dark mode.

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).

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).

Can you share the prompt you used to generate this game? (given chats aren't sharable)

Hm, the link isn't working for me

In the past week I created two apps within 3-5 iterations. No manual edits (other than .env).

Another one I thought was pretty cool was handing it some API docs for something, then had it build a UI and admin interface from scratch.

The dev agent tools these days aren't half bad, and they're getting better.

That hasn't been true since 3.5; it can and does generate full working code and sometimes with only a few attempts. Sometimes it cannot figure it out and then you need to fix it yourself as it will just loop forever. These things can be absolutely trivial (and thus frustrating) at times, but it's also fairly magical when it just does work.

Have you tried this tool?

I just generated two tetris games, one with ascii art and one with WebGL, and I found it quite impressive. Maybe simplistic apps, but still quite impressive with it's ability to create functional games and fix bugs with minor prodding.

A great auto-complete, I'd say. But that's as much as I've gotten out of it too. Still a huge productivity booster