Show HN: A web debugger an ex-Cloudflare team has been working on for 4 years

Too cheap.

It seems extremely inexpensive.

Even though it's not a direct comparison, look at https://www.hotjar.com/pricing/ (and switch to the "pay by month" pricing view)

"network tab" isn't it a security concern to record API calls?

Also how future proof it is with Google changing Chrome addons permissions / API etc...?

but the important information the engineer needed was what was actually right outside the boundary of the screenshot I took

Ah ah. At one gig we had trained the users to always send a screenshot of the entire screen. People reviewing the tickets would dump them if the screenshot was cropped and the user warned: "No full screenshot, no ticket".

Why? The most important info was the time at which the error happened (which, for users who were on Windows, was in the bottom right of the screen).

With the time we could look in the logs and the error/bug was usually obvious.

*engineers I work with are telling me that some of you are going to argue that types don’t exist in real javascript and that web assembly isn’t assembly

Nice looking landing page. Small bug, when I scroll down the page and then click "pricing" it doesn't take me to the right spot on the page until I click again. On Firefox 125.0.3

Looks similar to replay.io

The thing I love the most about Sentry/Bugsnag/Honeycomb/etc is that it is essentially automated observability. That is, I don't need to do a huge amount of integration to have, basically, a prioritized list of bugs along with severity and overall application health.

I like the idea of the browser extension being able to offer these kinds of tools where you wouldn't need to install a heavy Javascript snippet -- but I do think that taking the manual steps out of debugging wherever you can is the most efficient. With Bugsnag et al, I don't need to wait for a user to contact me. I shouldn't have to wait for someone to submit a Jam report in order to see how healthy my app is.

Looks very useful for developers but I am not a fan of being on a website that has a keylogger installed onto it. I know this is not the first tool to do this, but the thought of every single thing I do getting stored by some third party tool is a bit scary.

I got really excited before I saw there was no firefox support. Thats a deal breaker for my team :(

I really like this idea and if Firefox support was added I would purchase it in a heartbeat.

Haven't heard of this before, seems very useful!

God I wish there was something like this for mobile apps, though. Or a website running on the user's mobile device browser. I know Firefox Android does support extensions, but most people on Android use Chrome. And I think on iOS the browser extension situation was miserable the last time I read about it. Either way, an app would probably be the best way to do it.

A little under 10 years ago I used a product that was designed for improving the website by providing heat maps, but also let you drill down to individual sessions. You could see everything, from console to UI to mouse movements. It was actually pretty neat and incredibly useful for debugging.

It was so neat and useful that as an engineering team we had to hide it from the rest of the company because we were worried it would be used to “spy” on employees. (Id like to note that it was only ever installed on internal tooling that was custom built)

How has jam addressed this concern?

Also, is there self hosting?

Some thoughts:

- Make the scrubbed headers configurable (if it isn't already). For example, our token header is called `X-Session-Token` and is passed on every request. Would your current regex scrub this?

- Maybe clarify that the seat (pricing) is for recorders, not for people viewing them (which I think is a reasonable choice).

- Would be nice to configure auto-deletion of Jams after X days. We'd probably go with 180 days.

- Would be neat if the Sentry integration had configurable fields (at the team level set which ones are visible, and set fixed values for some of them). For example, I don't want anyone to set the project (that's the triage step in Linear), and I want only some teams to be selectable, I'd like to skip the 'effort' altogether, etc.

- Make it possible to configure the text body of the Linear issue, with placeholders for content. For example, we'd like to skip the full-screen (non-cropped), maybe show window size or add other metadata that is often relevant to us.

One question:

- For integration with Linear, you are asking for write access to the workspace. Maybe explain why that's needed, and what it means? Same for read (though this seems more reasonable, an explanation would still be useful)

Also ex-Cloudflare, have been following Jam for awhile, great product!

Something I would love is a way for customers to use this without having to install a Chrome extension. It would make debugging customer issues much faster - for example, if clicking 'Report a bug' on a website automatically triggered the recording flow and asked the user to reproduce it.

Are there extensions planned for other browsers? It seems right now when you click on "get jam" button, it takes me to the chrome web store.

This looks really interesting, but I want to walk you through the journey I just had on your pricing page.

1. This looks really cool and it has a free tier. 2. Okay you have to pay for bug trackers...oh cool they support Linear and it's only $8. Maybe I'll just put that on my creditcard and get the founders to pay for it once it's proven itself. 3.Oh wait that's for two users and I have 2 founders (non tech), 3 techs and then 1.5 designers. Oh the business tier is $50, well I guess I'll maybe discuss it with the founders.

My contact details are on my profile if you want further feedback, I have to run to a meeting.

nice work, love the landing page design, messaging/copy could be improved slightly. I was confused on how it was supposed to help me without going deeper if that makes sense.

Looks awesome, thanks for sharing. I definitely am also fighting with this. Common complaints "where is the video?" "where is the HAR file" etc. Their repro steps are usually bad.

So automatic repro steps sound great.

Looking at the homepage on that though it seems way too detailed and will fall prey to how I see our support and PM staff reporting bugs via videos they record today already: too many clicks and steps that are not necessary and when I try the exact same thing it works correctly.

The hard part of proper steps to reproduce is to reproduce it with a minimal set of steps that are also actually reproducible "from zero".

(of course there are some bugs that are very specific to some specific customers data you won't be able to repro but they are in the minority at least for us)

How do you solve that part?

I can't see anything on jam.dev/careers about where in the world you are located, or if you are open to remote applicants.

We’d call these non reproducible non errors (200 for GraphQl) as “usefully wrong.” You see this in AI a lot where they spent millions in market research or ask MBA types how to recommend a product and it turns out that someone buying a new laptop tends to also want to buy new shoes. You’d get people like executives not happy they looked bad for spending money on one thing only to find out they were way off. Good news is more revenue makes people look good, so that’s not a hard problem. What’s hard is if a contact us form stops working (bad example), people stop using it but still use the app the same way and spend as much is the form and the people behind it necessary or are people brand loyal and willing to put up just with a minor bug? Similarly if we get something not working and can’t reproduce it did a network card have a low level error that propagated in such a way even our monitoring couldn’t pick it up?

I thought this was a new error in complex systems we have now with hundreds of clusters creating basically non-deterministic problems. But fine I remembered before kernels became better at talking to things like drivers and external hardware we’d see weird bugs outside our boundaries that were really hard to track down and often never manifested themselves in the same way. This is when you’d go to the weird guy no one talked to and in a week he’d have some piece of odd C code with a hex value doing logic no one understood that bypassed whatever error we were having.

It is too bad those guys that I’m pretty sure didn’t do much largely fell victim to the MBA thinking of the 90s. Now we usually will have one team go well we are calling the code right and the other saying they are sending it right and both aren’t wrong except it isn’t working so they are. We’ve reached a point where we have contracts with every vendor because the problem usually is actually like a Cloudflare :) but I’d argue it’d be far easier to just fix or create a work around and file a bug with them then spend more time on daily calls working with someone like you and knowing your progress. So I know what you mean by tools companies use. Unless it has hit industry standard we won’t even evaluate open source as we couldn’t blame someone.

I think you should expand the bug report with classic fields like Preconditions, Expected and Actual Result...

We've started using this. It's fantastic! Great work. Thank you :)

Nice! I remember when this tool launched and I checked it out. It's really nice to use with easy to setup integrations. The instant replay feature especially is super cool! My biggest request would be to please add a Firefox extension!

The Jam team seems like a talented and good group of people. I applied a while back and while I was turned down I got an actual human response from the team. They also did a push to ask for input on improvements for Jam maybe a year ago and offered to donate $25 (iirc) to St Judes for every person who responded.

I wouldn't use "cloudflare" as a selling point. People that have used cloudflare know how good the engineering work they do actually is.

Nice work, looks like you've got some big names using it too, congrats.

I have some feedback on your homepage & messaging.

Initially scrolling the home page I thought it was a tool for viewing customer bug sessions, similar to TrackJS or Sentry.

Reading this post it became clear this is for product managers and/or team members to file bugs. The line "Built for everyone" on the home page threw me off.

I think if you make the distinction that this is an internal tool for teams vs. an external tool for tracking customer issues it might help make this messaging clearer.

I'm not sure of your plans (perhaps you also intend for external users to use it) this was just my first pass impression.

I think this is a great tool. The structured format combined with the information provided by the extension are what make it valuable to me. The last minute feature is also nice as re-creating bugs can be a PITA.

As a dev, I would ideally also want to be able to view stack traces with source maps, but having a consistent structured format combined with the extension data is enough of a value prop to start using it.

Landingpage tip: Show your real product at least once, in a screenshot, in a video. Currently all images, videos are stylized which makes me think you are hidding something or at least I do not know what I will get.

I would love it if you could bundle this into electron, there’s so many random electron apps for which the bug reporting workflow is still stuck in the 90s as you say.

JUST in time for me man thank you. I'm going to try it.

Our company has just grown to where it isn't just some engineers and a few sales guys. Now we're trying to keep engineers working efficiently. / accurately, and the support team is ramping up. Making it easy for the sales or support guys to log a good ticket or bug is a never ending challenge. This looks like a great option.

I worked in support for ages and later moved to an engineering role, it's a mountain to climb to get good communication / reproducing things accurately enough for the engineers to really take action effectively.

It’s actually really hard as a non-engineer to file useful bug tickets for engineers... So the engineer would be frustrated, I would be frustrated

While I have been in this scenario before, saying something along the lines of, "If I don't get 100% bug reports, I can't do 100% bug fixes," 9 years of experience and maturity later: no, I wouldn't use this. It wouldn't engender me more respect, power or efficacy in the organization if I "just" "educated" PMs on how to file bugs, or if I "just" used some tool for them.

I should have just not asked non-engineers to ticket bugs or do QA. If that is happening, you are already failing in terms of leadership and organization. Most products fail, so that's not saying much, and they rarely fail due to bugs, which is also not saying much. That said, the best technical solution is clearly comprehensive tracing, and the best cultural solution is that engineers responsible for an end user experience must manually QA all paths.

This looks incredible. Congrats on launching this.

I think SAML should be available for business tier as well.

I wish there were a way to trigger the bug reporter right on their landing page, so I can try it out from a user's point of view.

Edit: never mind - I see this is a browser extension, so kind of a non-starter.

do you have a hipaa compliant version?

Awesome! Will definitely give it a try!

Do you think this would work as a bug reporting solution for a desktop app using electron?

I make beekeeper Studio and struggle with bug reports being very vague

Is it something similar to Userback?

I've definitely felt this problem! Web app development can feel like 'playing detective' and chasing down lines more than problem solving. I'd download right now but will it help debug chrome extensions?

Can this be added to electron apps?

Sorry, but the need to create an account was an instant uninstall.

This is very cool! One of the hardest things in tech is to teach non tech people to write decent bugs. Our team wouldn’t be able to use this because HAR records at L7 only, after browser content-decoding. A lot of the problems we find end up with symptoms revealed by the encoder or decoder.

It prevents product managers (like I used to be) from being able to create vague and un-reproducible bug tickets (like I used to create).

... Like, sometimes I thought I included a screenshot, but the important information the engineer needed was what was actually right outside the boundary... Or I'd write that something "didn't work" but the engineer wasn't sure if I meant that it returned an error or if it was unresponsive...

...the way we capture and report bugs is just as manual and lossy as it was in the 1990’s

That's because bug reports are primarily communication among people, and the problems you describe are people problems, not technology problems.

Bug reports work when engineering can state what they need, and management is willing to support engineering's needs. Otherwise, bug reports devolve into the situation that you describe above.

In your case, this looks like a great tool for browser applications; but it only works if the people submitting the bug use the tool: I could easily envision a situation where a lousy manager ignores engineering's pleas to use Jam.

Looks great!

Heads up, for the `Backend Tracing` screenshot there's a typo, it reads "enviroment" with the missing 'n' and on the AI debugger page on narrower screens the bubble for the "Learn more about JamGPT" text doesn't fit the text.

I need this, but for Unreal Engine. :(

Why isn't this opensource?

Any chance you can create a cypress test or selenium test out of your repro steps? It looks like you are pretty close in the text description. Not that I want 1000's of UI tests but a UI test is a bug repro that never needed to happen.

Would love it if this supported more than web. Android, ios, etc.

I thought I should know that your main page is lagging super badly on machines without GPU acceleration

Had a quick look. Seems like an interesting tool. I know there are many companies in Europe that, for regulations and compliance reasons, cannot have their data leave Europe. As far as I can see from the documentation, the data is stored in the US. Would be nice to have an option to store the data in Europe. Or not having to upload any data at all. But instead have the option export an artifact that can be processed later. But perhaps that defeats the business.

[delayed]