Madness Alternatives

madness reviews and mentions

• Inside the XRPL AI Red Team: What We've Found and Fixed
  2 projects | dev.to | 29 May 2026

  Antithesis (fault-injection testing). We use Antithesis, a continuous fault-injection platform, to run rippled under adversarial conditions - exploring behaviors that only emerge under concurrent load, partial failures, or unusual transaction ordering. This catches a different class of bug than static analysis: timing-dependent crashes and assertion failures that only appear when the system is under stress. Antithesis has already caught real bugs that we have shipped fixes for in production releases.

• Should QA Exist
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Mar 2026

  > Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.

  I almost entirely agree. You'd certainly want a majority of QA responsibilities to fall to devs since that keeps the feedback loop tight. Also with the amount of compute we have you can trivially outpace a typical QA team with a single dev working on fuzz tests and property based tests. If you really still feel the need to outsource then there are cool tools like Antithesis [1] which let you trade money for compute in their complicated fuzz testing suite.

  Where that falls apart imo is when your software interacts with hardware in any non-trivial way. Fuzz testing doesn't really work when your system is spinning big and heavy things for example. Real hardware that interacts with the world will always create this gap where the devs don't know how to fully test it. Your systems engineers are best equipped to handle this and ensure certain controls follow the right curves, but they typically don't have the bandwidth or are very inexperienced with software. I think a QA organization _can_ fill this gap and deliver value. But I'd almost always prefer hiring another 1 or 2 system engineers who can work towards this problem full time instead. It's much easier to train someone in software than it is to train them in motor control or sealed systems.

  [1] https://antithesis.com/

• Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Feb 2026

  Loom does exhaustive search, with clever methods to prune it. On real world programs, you have to set a limit to that because it obviously grows extremely quickly even with the pruning.

  I've built something similar to Loom, except it's more focused on extensively modeling the C++11/Rust memory model (https://github.com/reitzensteinm/temper). My experience is that fairly shallow random concurrent fuzzing yields the vast majority of all concurrency bugs.

  Antithesis (https://antithesis.com/) are probably the leaders of the pack in going deeper.

• In Praise Of –Dry-Run
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Feb 2026
• GenAI for Engineers, What's Real, What's Not and What's Coming
  4 projects | dev.to | 19 Nov 2025

  Antithesis: Runs containers to catch edge-case bugs in staging.

• Testing is better than Data Structures and Algorithms
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Sep 2025

  https://antithesis.com/ was made to deal with this. You can think of its as a fuzzing but it has overall determinism for the whole system, so there is a time travel and interactive debugging.

• Zig Devlog: Self-Hosted x86 Back End Is Now Default in Debug Mode
  15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jun 2025

  Im pretty sure valgrind and friends can be used in zig.

  Zig is still not 1.0, theres not much stability guarantees, making something like Frama-C, even tho it is possible is simply going to be soo much pain due to constant breakages as compared to something like C.

  But it is not impossible and there have been demos of refinement type checkers https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

  Beyond that, tools like antithesis https://antithesis.com/ exist that can be used for checking bugs. [ I dont have any experience with it. ]

• Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Apr 2025

  Aphyr didn’t test foundation himself, but the foundation team did their own Jepsen testing which they reported passing. All of this was a long time ago, before Foundation was bought by Apple and open sourced.

  Now members of the original Foundation team have started Antithesis (https://antithesis.com/) to make it easier for other systems to adopt this sort of testing.

• XRPL Stability and Scalability Efforts
  2 projects | dev.to | 21 Apr 2025

  We leverage an autonomous testing platform called Antithesis to find bugs in our code. We provide the platform with workloads that test certain functionality, and the platform then performs fuzzing to try to make these tests fail. Antithesis helps us find the gnarly application bugs that we cannot otherwise detect easily when unintended but practical situations occur, such as a node crashing, the application is starved of cpu/memory, or a rare deadlock occurs.

• The Evolution of SRE at Google
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2025

  > Put another way, automated tests don’t go far enough. We need yet another higher layer of abstraction. Computers are better at deciding what tests to run and when, and are also better at interpreting the results.

  Sounds like you might be interested in https://antithesis.com/ (no affiliation).

• A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
  www.saashub.com | 9 Jun 2026

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