Loren_SL
Loren_SL on Hacker News
Have agents write scratch output outside the repo, while anything that matters lives in version control. That way you can purge the scratch files whenever you like.
Think of a project that helps you understand the machine and make it. Like visualizing virtual address space of a process. Input and output don't need to be fancy - just make a console application which read/writes using stdio.
It is not every day you see a VMS reference! Interesting read.
Thanks - I'll try to make it easier to read and tell what is going on.
Good points - maybe "arcane" would have been a better word to describe WinDbg - you can do just about anything, provided you know the right incantation. I hope you enjoy ForensicDbg!
Posted by
Loren_SL on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @03:15PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://www.forensicdbg.com
Hello HN!I've spent years debugging Windows crashes with tools that were either friendly but limited (e.g. Visual Studio) or powerful but archaic (e.g. WinDbg). I developed patterns and methods for understanding what was going on, and decided to build it into a much more effective debugging tool called ForensicDbg.I built a modern interface to minimize the friction when debugging. All of the...
Nice writeup. WinDbg has the same stale-cache trap on live Windows targets.
Does this work with stdio MCP servers? Or just http/https ones?
I always thought that traffic signals should be trying to minimize squared anger, where anger increases linearly with time spent waiting at intersection.
Having a clock you can play with also opens up ability to do things like bullet-time.
1: Don't keep it in memory. If you have to, keep it in memory for as short as time as possible and scrub it afterwards. For example, password fields.
2: If you generate crash dumps, scrub the dumps when you generate them. Some crash reporting services offer to do this automatically.
3: If you are writing anything client/server, where you control the server and the client runs on a users machine, never trust the client. Expect that it has been hacked, is being debugged, and is actively hostile.
I remember getting a 80387 chip for my Compaq 386/20. It has the same size package as the CPU! Now that makes a bit more sense.
This is a great writeup — bookmarking it. ForensicDbg is Windows-only right now, but I could easily see a day where I'm in your exact shoes trying to get a native postmortem debugger running on macOS.
This sounds like you would be entrusting Muse with an uncomfortable amount of personal information.