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Tusk Drift

Turn production traffic into API tests

Details

External ID
46637322
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Tusk Drift
Website domain
github.com
Launched
Jan. 15, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
33
Upvotes percentile
0.7292490118577075
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

Hi HN! In the past few months my team and I have been working on Tusk Drift, a system that records real API traffic from your service, then replays those requests as deterministic tests. Outbound I/O (databases, HTTP calls, etc.) gets automatically mocked using the recorded data.Problem we're trying to solve: Writing API tests is tedious, and hand-written mocks drift from reality. We wanted tests that stay realistic because they come from real traffic.versus mocking libraries: Tools like VCR/Nock intercept HTTP within your tests. Tusk Drift records full request/response traces externally (HTTP, DB, Redis, etc.) and replays them against your running service, no test code or fixtures to write/maintain.How it works:1. Add a lightweight SDK (we currently support Python and Node.js)2. Record traffic in any environment.3. Run `tusk run`, the CLI sandboxes your service and serves mocks via Unix socketWe run this in CI on every PR. Also been using it as a test harness for AI coding agents, they can make changes, run `tusk run`, and get immediate feedback without needing live dependencies.Source: https://github.com/Use-Tusk/tusk-drift-cliDemo: https://github.com/Use-Tusk/drift-node-demoHappy to answer questions!

Enrichment

Theme
proxy, dns, and networking tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Workflow automation
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
convert production traffic into api tests
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial The UI and test orchestration can be built quickly, but intercepting production network traffic, instrumenting outbound I/O (database queries, network requests), and deterministically replaying them with automated mocking requires non-trivial low-level runtime hooks.

What it would actually take: The system requires middleware or eBPF/bytecode instrumentation agents inside the application runtime (e.g., monkey-patching Node.js, JVM, or Go network/db drivers) to record exact incoming requests and downstream network/SQL responses. On replay, it must match incoming mock requests with high fidelity, sanitize sensitive production data, and filter nondeterminism (timestamps, UUIDs). This necessitates expertise in distributed systems tracing, bytecode/runtime instrumentation, and deterministic testing design.

Discussion

8 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: toran.sh (API governance and trace capture), voiden.md

Concerns raised: Sensitive data/PII leakage in captured traces and test fixtures, Currently lacks real-world performance/load testing capabilities, Doesn't measure real-world performance characteristics today

Feature requests: Performance/load testing capabilities, Capacity modeling and resource estimation, Ability to replay specific time periods for testing (e.g., Black Friday traffic)

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 58 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #23 of 59 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 56 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a workflow automation tool for Real estate yet.