One major lesson everyone learned from the recent popularity of DeepSeek R1's exposed thinking is that transparency matters.
At Colimit, we just took that lesson to heart and exposed the entire debugging process that's performed when we generate fixes for your failing CI builds (YouTube video walkthrough at the end of the post!)
It's obvious in retrospect, but Engineers don't just want fixes; they want to understand, debate, learn, and interact.
What's New 🚀
1. Root Cause Analysis Reports: Colimit now shares its internal logic: hypotheses, evidence (supporting/contradictory), confidence scores, and more. Like a code review for AI reasoning, so you can validate its logic or challenge its assumptions.
2. Deep Analysis Mode: For perplexing bugs like race conditions, CI-only failures, and other layered bugs, Colimit recursively chases dependencies, critiques its own hypotheses, and debates the merits of alternative fixes.
3. Analysis Mode Selection: Choose "Quick" (e.g., for linter errors), "Standard" (e.g., for most bugs), or "Deep" (e.g., for perplexing behavior).
Case Study 🔍
Recently Anchor.dev was debugging a failed CI build for 2-days straight (involving shared test-only DNS servers, parallel tests, mutexes, etc.), until Colimit's exposed analysis reports helped them:
- Review 3 root cause hypotheses with confidence scores
- Rank potential fixes by their merits vs risk/complexity
- Paste Slack threads to refine context with pre-existing investigations
The Result: They were able to isolate the root cause and fix it the next morning.
Engineers Hate Black Boxes 🛠️
This isn't just about automation, it's about closing the gap between "fixed" and understood. It's important to:
- Learn why a failing build happened, not just how to patch it
- Use the AI's hypotheses as a starting point for your own investigation
- Add team context (more logs, prior attempts) to steer the analysis
Why This Resonates 🎯
Tools that hide their logic breed distrust. Colimit's transparency turns fixes into teachable moments: so you debug with the AI, not just delegate to it.
Demo Video Walkthrough 📹
Big thanks to the Anchor team for trying out early versions of this tech and giving feedback on the value of visibility into the debugging process.
Here's a video walkthrough of how Colimit's deep Root Cause Analysis report helped Anchor debug a complex DNS-related CI failure: