# Tidewave

12 Hacker News commenters recommended Tidewave and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Lets AI coding agents inspect and debug your running Elixir app, so they can test changes with runtime feedback. People say it is quick to add as one dependency.

## Why people recommend it

- Agent tests and debugs running app (3 comments): "The agent basically is living inside your running app with access to databases, endpoints etc. It's awesome." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47393503)) "It's able to proactively debug and get runtime feedback on your modular code as it's being written." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46755535)) "In my experience it's a huge leap in terms of the agent being able to test and debug functionality." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139114))
- Single dependency, easy setup (3 comments): "Tidewave runs as a dependency in the framework and you just navigate to a url, it's quite refreshing actually." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844652)) "you just pull tidewave in as a single dependency, instead of downloading a bunch of scripts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46758776)) "Just so quick and easy, and the LLM seems to get things right quite often." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48482515))
- Works with Credo and Dialyzer (2 comments): "The tooling for inspecting and enforcing style (tidewave, credo, dialyzer, Dan's "vibe" ecosystem tools) is far beyond what I see in other ecosystems" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287224)) "The combination of credo, dialyzer, and tidewave means you have an iterative feedback loop" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930925))
- Smooth agent loop with hot reload (2 comments): "Elixir hot-reloading with Tidewave works well for agent loops" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001233)) "the agent + tidewave loop is a joy to use!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48961897))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Playwright MCP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/playwright-mcp.md): 40 recommend
- [Context7](https://hackerapproved.com/p/context7.md): 40 recommend
- [Chrome DevTools MCP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chrome-devtools-mcp.md): 36 recommend
- [Serena MCP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/serena.md): 18 recommend
- [Context Mode](https://hackerapproved.com/p/context-mode.md): 16 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Tidewave", https://hackerapproved.com/p/tidewave/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).