The New Stack Podcast Prequel: Software Errors Be Gone
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May 5, 2025 Discover how Prequel is shaking up the software reliability scene by democratizing error detection. Co-founders, both ex-NSA engineers, unveil an innovative approach using Common Reliability Enumerations (CREs) to pinpoint performance issues. Dive into the community-driven tools that allow developers to quickly build and share bug detectors. With the rapid rise of AI development and third-party integrations, Prequel aims to empower engineers with actionable insights rather than just symptoms, challenging the dominance of traditional observability giants.
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Founders' Bug Hunting Background
- Lyndon Brown shares that after more than a decade at NSA hunting elusive bugs, he and Tony Meehan started Prequel.
- They faced the challenge of balancing rapid development with controlling application failures, common to many engineering teams.
Insight on Common Reliability Enumerations
- Common Reliability Enumerations (CREs) provide a deterministic, declarative, and expressive way to find software problems.
- CREs aim to help teams discover and communicate recurring production issues more effectively than traditional observability tools.
How to Use Prequel's preq Tool
- Use Prequel's open-source tool, preq, to detect problems in real time by analyzing logs with continuously updated CREs.
- Run preq in your environment via kubectl plugin or standalone for multi-platform support and actionable problem reports.