The Stack Overflow Podcast In a deterministic simulation, you can debug with time travel
Jun 3, 2025
Will Wilson, Co-founder and CEO of Antithesis, shares his transformative journey from tech skeptic to passionate developer. The conversation dives into deterministic simulation testing, showcasing how it revolutionizes bug detection and enhances developer efficiency. Wilson emphasizes the power of AI in automating tedious debugging tasks and discusses the intricate relationship between simulations and generative AI. He also reveals innovative strategies for managing bugs effectively, ensuring software stability while tackling technical debt.
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Will Wilson's Path to Coding
- Will Wilson started as a self-taught programmer after running away from formal tech education.
- Writing a Python script to automate menial work revealed his talent and led him back into software engineering.
Testing Enables Risk-Taking
- Powerful testing, like deterministic simulation, lets you hire less experienced people safely.
- It enables teams to move faster and take more risks without causing production harm.
Benefits of Deterministic Simulation
- Deterministic simulation runs the system as a pure function, ignoring nondeterministic factors.
- This enables replaying rare bugs repeatedly exactly as they happened, surpassing traditional chaos testing.