nowfound

Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Playback – Interactive Programming and Print Debugging Reimagined

Ladies and gentlemen of a Lisp persuasion, Clojurians and Clojuristas, followers of the paren and everyone else covetously eyeing the greener grass, I made an open-source thing that I would like to share with you. My elevator pitch is that it'll make you forget all about regular print debugging in 10 minutes straight. The slightly longer pitch is this: #>(tag'n'trace any Clojure(-Script) form to `tap>` and Portal with automatic last-input function replay on eval, instant re-render and hassle-free insertion of traced data into the REPL) And before I end up pasting half the README here in bits…

Playback is an open-source debugging tool for Clojure and ClojureScript that replaces traditional print debugging. It tags and traces code forms, sending them to tap> and Portal for visualization. The tool… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Playback – Interactive Programming and Print Debugging Reimagined launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1
    Replay▲279

    Your time travel debugger

    2021 · replay.io · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Automated Penetration Testing for AI-Built Apps

    2021 · replay.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3AW

    Hey HN, I wanted to show you a product a small team and I have been working on for 4 years. https://jam.dev It’s called Jam and 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). It’s actually really hard as a non-engineer to file useful bug tickets for engineers. Like, sometimes I thought I included a screenshot, but the important information the engineer needed was what was actually right outside the boundary of the screenshot I took. Or I'd write that something "didn't work" but the engineer…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Debug web apps faster with record & replay

    2023 · requestly.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hey! We are presenting CodeTracer - a user-friendly time-traveling debugger designed to support a wide range of programming languages: https://github.com/metacraft-labs/codetracer?tab=readme-ov-f... CodeTracer records the execution of a program into a sharable self-contained trace file. You can load the produced trace files in a GUI environment that allows you to move forward and backward through the execution and to examine the history of all memory locations. They say a picture is worth a thousand words — well, a video is even better! Watch the demo below to see…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hey HN! We’re open-sourcing highlight.io (https://github.com/highlight/highlight), a session replay and error monitoring tool. Highlight.io gives you a high-precision video-like replay of what users are doing when an error or exception occurs in your web app, along with a full-fledged error monitoring experience (similar to bugsnag, rollbar, etc..). The main value prop of highlight.io is that we help you understand the full context surrounding an error and allow you to drill down to the code path that a user invoked (i.e user clicked button X, sent network request Y, and…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    A simple Python debugger and profiler that generates animated visualizations of program flow, useful for algorithm learning. - CCExtractor/vardbg

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Grep Clojure code using clojure.spec regexes. Contribute to borkdude/grasp development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9DR

    I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A private, browser-only ClojureScript playground powered by the self-hosted compiler.

    2016 · cljsfiddle.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    I got tired of sharing AI demos with terminal screenshots or screen recordings. Claude Code already stores full session transcripts locally as JSONL files. Those logs contain everything: prompts, tool calls, thinking blocks, and timestamps. I built a small CLI tool that converts those logs into an interactive HTML replay. You can step through the session, jump through the timeline, expand tool calls, and inspect the full conversation. The output is a single self-contained HTML file — no dependencies. You can email it, host it anywhere, embed it in a blog post, and it works on mobile. Repo:…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I built Staying – a tool that instantly turns your code into interactive animations with no setup required. Just write or paste your code and hit "Visualize". No installs, no accounts, no configuration. *Supports*: Python, JavaScript & experimental C++

    2025 · staying.fun · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hi HN! We’re Adrien and Kanav. We met at our previous job, where we spent about a third of our lives combating a constant firehose of bugs. In the hope of reducing this pain for others in the future, we’re working on automating debugging. We’re currently working on a platform that ingests logs and then automatically reproduces, root causes and ultimately fixes production bugs as they happen. You can see some of our work on this here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39528087 As we were building the root-cause phase of our automated debugger, we realized that we developed…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Experimenting with Clojure 1.9's tools.deps and CLI - ethagnawl/tools-deps-experiment

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    A Clojure game library. Contribute to oakes/play-clj development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hi HN, I built this because I got tired of the Claude Code CLI hiding details from me. Recent updates have replaced critical output with summaries like "Read 3 files" or "Edited 2 files". To see what actually happened, I was forced to use `--verbose`, which floods the terminal with unreadable JSON and system prompts. I wanted a middle ground: *Full observability without the noise.* `claude-devtools` is a local Electron app that tails the session logs in `~/.claude/` to reconstruct the execution trace in real-time. *Unlike wrappers, it solves the visibility gap in your native…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17UO

    Hello HN! Parth, and Shardul here. We have been building unlogged.io for the last 21 months. We started as a time travel debugger and pivoted to record and replay with assertions, mocking, and code coverage. You can save the replays in the form of a JSON and commit them to your git. Both Parth and I come from an e-commerce/payments background where production bugs meant heavy financial losses. Big billion days/Black Friday sales meant months of code freezes with low productivity. Before committing the code, we wanted to replay production traffic and know the breaking changes right…

    2023 · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    A dbg(…) macro for C++. Contribute to sharkdp/dbg-macro development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey everyone! I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on throughout my university studies. It’s called BiTE (https://github.com/WINSDK/bite) and it's a tool primarily focused on being an executable viewer with reverse engineering capabilities. BiTE supports Windows, MacOS, and Linux, along with their associated executable formats. It’s also capable of parsing and displaying debug information using DWARF/PDB formats, which I hope will be useful even for just comparing codegen. I’ve put a lot of effort into this and it's the first time I'm releasing something…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20VT

    Hi All, this is Shardul here - I am the co-founder of Videobug. https://bug.video We are super excited to share Videobug with you. Videobug records run time code execution so that developers can watch it line by line as frequently as they want, right in their IDE. It takes away the pain of recreating exact conditions that led to a bug and saves developer time in every bug squash. Parth (my co-founder) and I have worked on multiple production grade applications in startups and enterprises. We used Logrocket, Sentry, and Datadog for logging and found ourselves adding more logs after…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Debugging-friendly exceptions for Python. Contribute to cknd/stackprinter development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Helps analyze goroutines. Inspired by TDA for Java and goroutine-inspect for golang. - openziti/goroutine-analyzer

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Live logs inside your IDE to Debug without context switching

    Apr 2026 · mobileagents.io · its alternatives →

  24. 24RC

    GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

    2016 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →