Hey HN, I wanted to show you a product a small team and I have been working on for 4 years. <a href="https://jam.dev" rel="nofollow">https://jam.dev</a><p>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).<p>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 wasn't sure if I meant that it returned an error or if it was unresponsive. So the engineer would be frustrated, I would be frustrated, and fixing stuff would slow to a halt while we went back and forth to clarify how to repro the issue over async Jira comments.<p>It’s actually pretty crazy that while so much has changed in how we develop software (heck, we have types in javascript now*), the way we capture and report bugs is just as manual and lossy as it was in the 1990’s. We can run assembly in the browser but there’s still no tooling to help a non-engineer show a bug to an engineer productively.<p>So that’s what Jam is. Dev tools + video in a link. It’s like a shareable HAR file synced to a video recording of the session. And besides video, you can use it to share an instant replay of a bug that just happened — basically a 30 second playback of the DOM as a video.<p>We’ve spent a lot of time adding in a ton of niceties, like Jam writes automatic repro steps for you, and Jam’s dev tools use the same keyboard shortcuts you’re used to in Chrome dev tools, and our team’s personal favorite: Jam parses GraphQL responses and pulls out mutation names and errors (which is important because GraphQL uses one endpoint for all requests and always returns a 200, meaning you usually have to sift through every GraphQL request when debugging to find the one you’re looking for)<p>We’re now 2 years in to the product being live and people have used Jam to fix more than 2 million bugs - which makes me so happy - but there’s still a ton to do. I wanted to open up for discussion here and get your feedback and opinions how can we make it even more valuable for you debugging?<p>The worst part of the engineering job is debugging and not even being able to repro the issue, it’s not even really engineering, it’s just a communication gap, one that we should be able to solve with tools. So yeah excited to get your feedback and hear your thoughts how we can make debugging just a little less frustrating.<p>(Jam is free to use forever — there is a paid tier for features real companies would need, but we’re keeping a large free plan forever. We learned to build products at Cloudflare and free tier is in our ethos, both my co-founder and I and about half the team is ex-Cloudflare) and what we loved there is how much great feedback we’d get because the product was mostly free to use. We definitely want to keep that going at Jam.)<p>By the way, we’re hiring engineers and if this is a problem that excites you, we’d love to chat: jam.dev/careers
Nice work, looks like you've got some big names using it too, congrats.<p>I have some feedback on your homepage & messaging.<p>Initially scrolling the home page I thought it was a tool for viewing customer bug sessions, similar to TrackJS or Sentry.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I'm not sure of your plans (perhaps you also intend for external users to use it) this was just my first pass impression.<p>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.<p>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.
I got really excited before I saw there was no firefox support. Thats a deal breaker for my team :(<p>I really like this idea and if Firefox support was added I would purchase it in a heartbeat.
> but the important information the engineer needed was what was actually right outside the boundary of the screenshot I took<p>Ah ah. At one gig we had trained the users to <i>always</i> send a screenshot of the entire screen. People reviewing the tickets would dump them if the screenshot was cropped and the user warned: <i>"No full screenshot, no ticket"</i>.<p>Why? The most important info was the <i>time</i> at which the error happened (which, for users who were on Windows, was in the bottom right of the screen).<p>With the time we could look in the logs and the error/bug was usually obvious.
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.
From <a href="https://jam.dev/docs" rel="nofollow">https://jam.dev/docs</a>:<p>Jam is a browser extension that allows you to create the perfect bug report in just one click. You will now be able to capture an instant replay of the bug happening on your web app and include all the developer logs required to cut your bug reporting time by 20x.<p>(to me that was a more useful summary)
JUST in time for me man thank you. I'm going to try it.<p>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.<p>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.
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 love the look of this tool and will be recommending our QA team take a look. However, I would like to encourage you to make SSO free and available to everyone. Better security should be a focus for everyone, not just those on an "Enterprise" plan. Tailscale recently had a great blog post about their SSO tax journey[0]. Please don't get added to the SSO Wall Of Shame[1].<p>[0] <a href="https://tailscale.com/blog/sso-tax-cut" rel="nofollow">https://tailscale.com/blog/sso-tax-cut</a><p>[1] <a href="https://sso.tax/" rel="nofollow">https://sso.tax/</a>
"network tab" isn't it a security concern to record API calls?<p>Also how future proof it is with Google changing Chrome addons permissions / API etc...?
Also ex-Cloudflare, have been following Jam for awhile, great product!<p>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.
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!<p>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.
This looks really cool! Someone who worked adjacent to S2 (Cloudflare's remote browser isolation product) told me this would be a good idea to use BrowserBox for this reproducible bug replays around 2 years back. But I didn't have any other input that said the same so we didn't pursue it.<p>I think I could probably build a competitor to this that doesn't require a chrome extension, using BrowserBox. We already have web DevTools (just right-click or context-click the screen in): <a href="https://browse.cloudtabs.net/signupless_sessions" rel="nofollow">https://browse.cloudtabs.net/signupless_sessions</a> and can record the screen output.<p>But I think hard to replicate will be your first mover advantage, client list, and bunch of other features and integrations. It's interesting you got it to such a state of readiness and polish before posting. Is that about acknowledging the replicability of the tech so you want to protect against that? Or customer requests? Or maybe more just team bias towards products of extreme beauty! :)<p>Congratulations on this successful launch! I look forward to exploring ways we might be able to collaborate on a web version (that also works on mobile etc, using BrowserBox/CloudTabs!!!).
> 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).<p>> ... 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...<p>> ...the way we capture and report bugs is just as manual and lossy as it was in the 1990’s<p>That's because bug reports are primarily communication among people, and the problems you describe are <i>people problems,</i> not <i>technology problems.</i><p>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.<p>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.
*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
I built a similar tool in 2016 called Bugcam that does exactly this. It was also a chrome extension with the ability to tie console logs and network traffic to screenrecordings. Jam looks really polished and far more usable than the weekend hack I put together :) Well done!<p>The explanation for why OP built Jam was precisely the motivation I had for building Bugcam. I had transitioned to a team in Europe as part of an acquisition that had non-technical PMs filing bug reports. Their reports were completely nondescript and incredibly frustrating to decipher and repro.<p>I ended up abandoning the project due to other opportunities that came up. One interesting thing I noticed was that a significant percentage of users downloaded Bugcam to record themselves playing games for YouTube. Perhaps there was another opportunity there, but I decided not to pursue it.<p>Congrats on the product and best of luck Jam team!
I've been playing with this for a few hours and had similar questions about scrubbing custom tokens or headers from the submitted data.<p>One concern I have about the instant-replay feature is the potential performance implications when monitoring multiple tabs or windows. I'm not particularly fond of the idea of all sites in this way and prefer better controls there.<p>I saw the block list inside the extension, but I think an allow list makes more sense for this use case. That way, <i>.ycombinator.com or </i>.example could work as opt-in for instant replay, and ideally, those domains could be preconfigured at the team level.<p>Acknowledging Chrome's extension per-site permissions is a valid option, but it's clunky.<p>+1 vote for a datadog integration, in addition to backend data I would love to see this work well with RUM. For now, I'll settle for jamming a common ID into Jam.Metadata and see how that works out.<p>I also thought Jam would accept bug reports from end-users and look forward to the development of that feature.<p>Comments synced to timestamps in the recordings are nice. Have you considered a scribble/annotation like the still screenshots, but for videos? The annotations could be anchored to the comment timestamp, and they would help capture a UX micro-interactions that may not be obvious in a still or video.
Okay, so, stupid question; could you replace this with this screen recorder[1] and browsers' built-in web dev tools[2] ? The screen recorder lets you record and download a session (nothing is uploaded), and the dev tools lets you capture any errors the browser sees, the network connections & errors, the source, browser data/steps, yadda yadda.<p>The built-in web dev tools have a <i>Recorder</i> function to record what the browser is doing while also recording video[3]. You can export the recording in a number of formats. It can replay it, let you edit steps, even simulate a slow network. Seems like a product person could follow a simple guide to record and export a session, and send it to a dev?<p>[1] <a href="https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/screen_recorder/" rel="nofollow">https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/screen_recorder/</a> [2] <a href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/</a> [3] <a href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/recorder" rel="nofollow">https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/recorder</a>
Kind of funny, I was just looking at adding similar functionality to an internal Chrome plugin I built because we struggle to get enough useful info in bug reports (being able to look at the HAR, in particular, is useful, but difficult to get users to do correctly).<p>Two questions -<p>1) Any way to customize which headers/cookies get scrubbed?<p>2) Is there a way to get something like the lower-level export you can get by going to chrome://net-export/?
Some thoughts:<p>- 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?<p>- Maybe clarify that the seat (pricing) is for recorders, not for people viewing them (which I think is a reasonable choice).<p>- Would be nice to configure auto-deletion of Jams after X days. We'd probably go with 180 days.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>One question:<p>- 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)
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.<p>So automatic repro steps sound great.<p>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.<p>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".<p>(of course there are some bugs that are <i>very</i> specific to some specific customers data you won't be able to repro but they are in the minority at least for us)<p>How do you solve that part?
We have been using Jam on our team for a long time (~2 years) and it is awesome! Everyone on our team is posting jam videos to report bugs, explain and walkthrough issues, add a demo on every PR with a demo of what frontend changes are included in the ticket so that QA can get a jump start on understanding the scope of what to test.<p>I normally just record the jam and get a link and paste it wherever, but I love the ability to have Jam create jira tickets for me. And THANK YOU for making it easy to choose the sprint! the Slack Atlassian plugin makes it impossible to find the sprint and shows all the closed sprints that cannot be used for new tickets.<p>Really an awesome tool. I have been using it to report bugs for any random open source project I am working on.
Does anyone have any stats on how successful these small niche tool shops are from the business perspective? On the one hand $8/mo is pretty negligible. But on the other people will go to great lengths to not have “yet another subscription”. If we run some math a shop of 10 people in the US is at least $2.5M in just comp outlay per year, all in (meaning the entire comp package, not just net pay). At 96 bucks per year that’s about 26K users (assuming zero marketing expenses and zero cost of accepting payment) which idk if that’s realistic or not for a nice to have tool like this. What’s the business plan here? Is there a business plan?
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.
I didn't dig too deeply so maybe I missed it but your site doesn't mention how this works from a technical standpoint, i.e. do both reporters and devs need to have this extension installed, or just the reporters? If just the reporters, in what format are the bug reports captured? I.e. if it's a video plus metadata, does it save a .mp4 (or whatever) video file plus a .json file with the metadata?<p>Knowing more up front about how the whole thing works would make me more inclined to try it, especially since I'm wary of tools that take liberties with what they capture and store.
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?
Thank you all so much for all your feedback and support. The team and I are blown away by your ideas and thoughts — it means a lot and it’s been such a magic of the internet moment to get to talk to 150 of you about this project we’ve spent four years on so far. You’ve helped us decide on some next features and I hope when you see them ship they are what you hoped to see when you suggested them here in this thread. Thank you all, HN you are an awesome place. Have a great weekend, y’all!
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.<p>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)<p>How has jam addressed this concern?<p>Also, is there self hosting?
This is a really cool tool! I wanted to ask - you mention HAR files - how do you ensure tokens and secrets don’t end up in them / stored on your end or anywhere else they may end up?
Pretty soon after the initial launch of Jam.dev I tried as an alternative to Bugherd. At the time it was only screenshots and annotations and we were missing the browser information provided by the currently used tool.
It seems it's time to try it again, after many evolutions. As we mostly did frontend development and wanted feedback from clients, the killer feature for me was the selection and capture of a specific HTML element.
This is an useful tool. I wish there was something similar for desktop applications.<p>The nice thing about implementing this for the web is that the API you have to record data from (DOM events) is the same no matter what UI toolkit you use on top of it. But on desktop, the ecosystem is more fragmented and would require more ports and quirks to implement a widely compatible bug recorder.<p>I'm not a fan of webdev, but this is an advantage it has over desktop development.
Nice work!
Suggestions<p>1)Jam requires being on a website page to load, which might not always align with how users interact with browser extensions, often using them independently of a webpage<p>2) Wouild be nice to have an option to record two windows<p>3) Visibility of the extension popup in recordings when sharing a browser window - I can see extension popup open on the recording only when I share the entire screen<p>Thank you! Haven't explored all functionality yet but already love Jam <3
Not sure being "ex-Cloudflare" gives you the positive credentials you think it does.<p>Pretty much all "Cloudflare" experience most people have will be something negative, like getting blocked from some website, just seeing the huge clouflare logo instead. Even as a programmer, I pretty much just hate Cloudflare, despite knowing it's more than this annoying screen or stupid captcha between me and some website.
Haven't heard of this before, seems very useful!<p>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.
Looks like 'large free plan' includes 25 jams. I was able to make only 10 or so jams (I could have deleted some jams but no more than 2 or 3) and now I have to 'Upgrade'.
I think this is really awesome. Our company has a monolithic giant that is full of tech debt and high support cost from our on premise web application. Half the battle is asking the clients to send screenshots or properly explain the issue. For us would be an easy sell if we could integrate natively with the apps front end tech stack.
I would of preferred this as a stand alone electron app. I don't feel comfortable with giving a random extension the power to control my entire browser, particularly in a work environment.<p>That said, this looks outstanding, it could really be a great option for QA teams.
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.
Not to steal your thunder but we're building the same tool [1] but for the WHOLE desktop experience, not just the browser - if anyone has any feedback I'd love to talk to you!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.dashcam.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.dashcam.io</a>
Looks great!<p>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.
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.
Too cheap.<p>It seems extremely inexpensive.<p>Even though it's not a direct comparison, look at <a href="https://www.hotjar.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hotjar.com/pricing/</a> (and switch to the "pay by month" pricing view)
Tools like OpenReplay and Fullstory already are capable of capturing a scary amount of information. I'm curious how far you could go with this idea <i>without</i> the need to be an extension. What would really be missing?
Really cool product.<p>One of those ideas/things that seems to just be "obvious" after the fact. Especially in the realm of bug reports which are very tedious to submit.<p>Kinda inspiring me to try and look around me for similar problems to solve.
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.<p>Edit: never mind - I see this is a browser extension, so kind of a non-starter.
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
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
Do you think this would work as a bug reporting solution for a desktop app using electron?<p>I make beekeeper Studio and struggle with bug reports being very vague
This looks really interesting, but I want to walk you through the journey I just had on your pricing page.<p>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.<p>My contact details are on my profile if you want further feedback, I have to run to a meeting.
You may want to use a different example than ‘cheese pizza’ on the homepage…<p><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cheese_pizza" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cheese_pizza</a>
I wouldn't use "cloudflare" as a selling point. People that have used cloudflare know how good the engineering work they do actually is.
> 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<p>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.<p>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.
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?<p>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.<p>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.