Launch HN: Ghostship (YC S25) – AI agents that find bugs in your web app
Ghostship lets you find bugs in your web app by entering in your URL and describing a user journey.
Here's a video of Ghostship in action: https://www.loom.com/share/dec264ae32f94d50adb141c9246837c3?....
For over half our lives, we've been developers and we've done tons of user-facing projects like a coding competition I built called CerealCodes or freelancing projects on Upwork. The biggest problem we faced was that we shipped bugs in edge cases we didn't test, and the process of testing was annoying to do everytime we shipped a new feature. We tried automated testing tools, but those were flaky and couldn't adapt to feature changes. They also were really annoying to set up.
Our solution is to use browser agents to help you find bugs in your web app by clicking through your product like users would. You'd enter in your URL, describe what a user would do, and Ghostship would go through and try finding bugs by going through the user journey and extrapolating edge cases by visually seeing where else to click as it goes through each step in the user journey. We then show session replays of our agents going through your web app and list out all the steps it took.
We're able to find edge cases with almost no prompting. All you need to do is enter in one URL and one user journey (if you have login credentials on your web app, enter in some test credentials).
One bug we were able to find with Ghostship was on the YC application page. Apparently you could add your education dates in reverse chronological order (April 2022 to January 2021, which makes no sense).
Another bug we were able to find was a crypto smart contract CRM dashboard we vibe coded where we found a bug involving data corruption when you tried editing a draft contract multiple times.
You can sign up here: https://playground.tryghostship.dev/ for a limited number of credits. We'd love to hear from the HN community, whether you're building a web app for fun or a developer shipping a cool user-facing product to customers. We'd love to see what bugs we can find in your web app with Ghostship!
p.s. If you want Ghostship directly in your CI/CD pipeline and run after every PR, book a demo with us.
And likely this type of thing is not suitable for CI use. CI systems are already too slow and flaky. You want to run this type of thing nightly.
For example look at supabase. They basically sell a DX CLI + UI as their core offering. But that’s not a real business. So they sell off the shelf AWS RDS + postgrest + gotrue and now it is a cohesive platform that you can charge real money for. But those pieces are just the easy to assemble legos around their core thing. Not to belittle how impressive they are at shipping, but a lot of what makes supabase great is the brilliant assembly of these preexisting components, wrapped in a delicious package
As we all know, in large orgs the form issue has been solved by using trusted components with unit tests. What worries me is how somebody were actually to provide valuable bugs, those that keep you up at night trying to fix them.
I worked with exploratory testing companies that would report hundreds of bug that nobody ever cared about. Does YC really care about the bug that they found, or have a business impact?
(Actually coming from building a company in this area now https://desplega.ai, you can try it out for free too)
Also a nitpick, but there are profanities on your landing page and it kinda puts me off.
The product looks interesting. My only question would be what does a common successful description of a user journey look like?
Is it pages and pages of prompting to get the agents to understand or do you see success with less verbose descriptions?
I don’t know why someone would be expected to be aware of a niche, local, artist community or their history
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire
It wasn't the community that sparked attention, but the shoddy living conditions and that people had to resort to living in a warehouse in the Bay Area because of unaffordable housing (and which indirectly led to the conditions for the fire to happen).
But again I wouldn't expect recent YC people who just moved to the Bay Area to know about it.
I have never heard of this event.
Also according to Wikipedia 36 people died. 31 people have died in Nepal due to their political shenanigans the past few days and I highly doubt anyone not involved in the region is going to remember in 10 years.
It seems really weird to me to be calling out random people for naming collisions with incredibly local, niche, news events from a decade ago
Finally, East Bay is a very common term, even encompassing a well known guitar player. Would you consider that if you’re not familiar with that term, you’re maybe not a very good judge of how common the knowledge of an event is? I’m from nowhere near San Francisco, but both East Bay and Ghost Ship are front of mind for me.