Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix

Today, we’re introducing Tidewave Web for Rails and Phoenix: a coding agent that runs directly in the browser alongside your web application, in your own development environment, with full page and code context.

Unlike traditional coding agents that require constant back-and-forth, Tidewave Web knows your UI state, understands your framework, and runs within your actual development environment. No more describing what’s on your screen, copying stacktraces, or losing context between tools.

Our key features are:

• Shared page context – Tidewave has direct access to your current UI state and automatically maps it to the corresponding controllers, views, and templates, eliminating the need to describe what you’re looking at or manually trace code paths

• Deep framework integration – Tidewave can execute code within your running Rails/Phoenix app, query your database, monitor logs, access documentation, and more, giving the agent the same developer tools that you have

• Collaborative browser testing – Tidewave builds complete features in your app and validates they work right there in the browser. Use our point and click inspector to suggest improvements and request changes

• Runs in your dev environment – Add one package to your Rails/Phoenix app, connect your existing GitHub Copilot or Anthropic account, and visit the /tidewave route from your web app in the browser

You can try Tidewave Web for free.

It’s all about the shared context

Using traditional coding agents to build web features means constantly switching between tools. You see something in your browser that needs changing, switch to your editor to find the right template, then describe what you want to an AI that can’t see the web page.

The agent says it’s finished. You refresh your browser and get a runtime exception. Back to the editor to explain the error. The agent fixes it. Back to the browser and now there’s a missing database migration. Back to the editor again.

You become a constant translator for an agent that’s working blind. That’s effectively because you and the agent are working with two separate contexts:

Tidewave Web eliminates this back-and-forth. Click our inspector to select any UI element (say, a menu container) and tell it: “Add a CSV export button to this menu that exports the data on this page. Implement the whole feature.”

Tidewave sees exactly what you selected and directly maps it to a template, and its associated controller and view. As it builds the feature, it automatically queries your database to understand your data, accesses your models and schemas, tests the functionality by actually using it in the browser, and reads logs when anything goes wrong. Tidewave creates a shared context between you, the agent, and your web app:

Tidewave handles the tedious cycles so you can focus on what matters.

What’s in the package

Tidewave Web is available as a package for Rails and Phoenix and requires either a GitHub Copilot subscription or an Anthropic API key. Once you install it, visit the /tidewave route of your web application, and sign up for a free trial account limited to 20 user messages per month. You can unlock unlimited messages by subscribing to Tidewave Pro at $10/month.

For this initial release, we’ve focused on the integration between the agent and your web app: the agent’s ability to interact with your pages and deep web framework integration. Many additional agentic features are on our roadmap, such as TODOs and subagents, and we want to work closely with our first users to prioritize and refine them.

Tidewave Web currently works best for full-stack Rails and Phoenix applications. It doesn’t currently “see” client-side frameworks like React or Vue, so these stack won’t get the full Tidewave benefits yet. React support is on the roadmap and coming soon.

We’re also working on integrating more web frameworks, such as Django, Flask, and Next.js. Join our waiting list or our Discord Server to be notified when those versions go live.

The next generation of AI developer tools

At Dashbit, the team behind Tidewave, we have collectively decades of experience building, maintaining, and contributing to developer tools, web frameworks, and programming languages. With Tidewave, we’re exploring a new direction for AI developer tooling. The current generation of AI coding assistants are horizontal tools that work across all languages and domains. They understand code, but they don’t understand how that code actually runs nor interact with what it produces.

Software development spans diverse domains and technologies, and we believe the next generation of AI tools must understand them intrinsically. A web development agent should see and interact with pages in shared context with the developer, not as a separate tool requiring constant explanation, and have full access to the web framework runtime. For mobile development, agents should interact with device APIs, run simulators, and integrate with the developer’s existing workflow. Those are the challenges we want to tackle with Tidewave.

This concept extends across every vertical in software development, from game development to IoT. Each domain has its own runtime environment, validation methods, and debugging workflows that generic tools simply can’t grasp (and MCPs aren’t enough to close the contextual gap).

Our team is already exploring a few of these domain-specific possibilities. Tidewave Web for Rails and Phoenix is just the beginning, and we’re excited to share what comes next.

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