Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
1–10 of 60 posts
Re: Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
#2The details on what the architecture of this aren't clear, but I can see that the big feature is deeper integration into the browser.
To me this is an obvious direction for all coding agents to go in. Right now the cursor chrome browser MCP server doesn't work very well, but it's very obvious to me that this is the direction things need to go in.
I'm not sure why focusing on a framework would fundamentally make this any better than the generic approach to getting good context directly from the browser.
Re: Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
#3I spent a couple of hours last night testing it out.
The login process didn't work well, but it's due to my browser having a seperate container for Github.
I asked it to add a feature using Stimulus.js to my very simple gallery page written in Rails, when you hover over an image in the gallery, it should make an icon appear, and when clicking the icon, a modal should pop-up that allows the user to do cropping.
It picked up on my database models and it produced a very good result, however, it seemed to have issues verifying its solution, it particularly seemed to struggle with "on-hover".
The solution it produced was a lot better than what claude-code produced, and I liked the interface.
I also ended up hitting the limits on the Anthropic API, and it wasn't obvious to me what I should do in that case, but that's likely not the fault of Tidewave, and the Context Window Usage having a maximum of 200.0k also seemed very high, but that probably contributed to me hitting a limit.
Re: Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
#4The details on what the architecture of this aren't clear, but I can see that the big feature is deeper integration into the browser. To me this is an obvious direction for all coding agents to go in. Right now the cursor chrome browser MCP server doesn't work very well, but it's very obvious to me that this is the direction things need to go in. I'm not sure why focusing on a framework would fundamentally make this…
When using browser-tools-mcp I can point to an element and ask Agent to "change color of this element to red". It would copy the part of the HTML and search the codebase for it.
I can imagine having an in browser, framework level tool would know exactly which controller and which template generated this element and could target it more precisely while using less tool calls and less tokens. I haven't tested it yet but that is my expectation.
Re: Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
#5This looks promising. I will definitely be giving it a shot. I have been getting pretty good results with Claude Code and Rails for a while now, I'm kind of excited to see how much things can improve with this.
Re: Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
#6I spent a couple of hours last night testing it out. The login process didn't work well, but it's due to my browser having a seperate container for Github. I asked it to add a feature using Stimulus.js to my very simple gallery page written in Rails, when you hover over an image in the gallery, it should make an icon appear, and when clicking the icon, a modal should pop-up that allows the user to do cropping. It pic…
Thank you `kawsper` for the feedback!
We are going to introduce more visibility into the context limit and make it easier to summarize.
Regarding the on-hover, do you still have the snippets around that it tried? We instruct the model to dispatch events using the proper browser APIs and I wonder what it tried to do. I would love to hear more! You can ping me on Tidewave's Discord (https://discord.gg/5GhK7E54yA) or send me an email (see github.com/josevalim).
Re: Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
#7The details on what the architecture of this aren't clear, but I can see that the big feature is deeper integration into the browser. To me this is an obvious direction for all coding agents to go in. Right now the cursor chrome browser MCP server doesn't work very well, but it's very obvious to me that this is the direction things need to go in. I'm not sure why focusing on a framework would fundamentally make this…
There are two main reasons why being framework specific can be a big boost:
1. We annotate and understand your template language. So when you select an element, we not only know its tag and attributes, but we also know which template file rendered it. The more structured the template language is (JSX, HEEx, etc), the better job we can do, which means LLMs don't have to guess.
2. We also run code within the web framework. This means database access, built-in documentation using the exact versions in your project, access to language and framework reflection/introspection APIs, etc. So the agents have more, err, agency.
I hope this clarifies it a bit!
Re: Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
#8I think opinionated frameworks like this are a good fit for ai.
Usually only one correct and idiomatic way to do things, and rails in particular really leans on convention over configuration.
Re: Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
#9Hi folks! Great to see our work on the front page, and I'm happy to answer questions.
Regarding next steps, we're currently working on React integration, with Python and JavaScript server-side web frameworks coming next. If you're interested, here's our survey/waiting list: https://forms.gle/8MeXwGjpBFDeGNQw9
Re: Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix
#10I think opinionated frameworks like this are a good fit for ai. Usually only one correct and idiomatic way to do things, and rails in particular really leans on convention over configuration.
Opinionated frameworks, strict types, and whatever non-ai tools for correctness validations (typescript, linters, compilers) are all helpful.