side quests
the pursuits around the company — foundationdb itself, the nes r&d program, bugbash, and the open-source satellites.
the founders' earlier work
- 2000–2009visual sciences · endedscherer and lavezzo's pre-foundationdb company — an early web-analytics/big-data platform where scherer first built a model-based simulation to hunt tail-latency pathologies. sold to omniture, later absorbed into adobe. the ancestral line of the determininator.
- 2009–foundationdb · handed-offthe prior venture — still open source under apple, powering cloudkit and deployed at snowflake. the simulation harness and flow language were its load-bearing idea; antithesis exists because the approach stayed trapped inside one database.
- ~2004–2009computational biodynamics · endedwilson's first company, co-founded right after high school — a finite-element model of the human brainstem and spinal cord for injury diagnostics. irb-approved human studies, dod grants, an spie paper. the proof that wilson's career started in simulation, not testing.
- ~2000vpython · handed-offscherer's cmu-era project — python bindings for real-time 3d graphics, used to teach intro physics for decades. the first time he built a simulated world for other people to think in.
the company's quests
- 2023–the nintendo corpus · continuingthe nes program — super mario bros., zelda (real glitches found, incl. speedrunner exploits), metroid, castlevania. officially r&d for the exploration engine ('this is actually how we figured this stuff out'), unofficially the best demo loop in testing.
- 2024–the open source giveaway · continuingfree deterministic-simulation testing for qualifying open-source projects — the standing answer to the launch-day 'no free tier' complaint, run as a program rather than a product tier.
- 2025–bugbash · activethe company's own conference — 'not a software testing conference, but a software correctness conference.' ~200 seats sold out in dc in 2025; bugbash europe announced for copenhagen, september 30, 2026. the bugbash podcast is at season two. wilson's strange-loop nostalgia, institutionalized.
- 2026–hegel · activedavid maciver and liam devoe's cross-language property-based-testing family — rust first, go/c++/ocaml/typescript announced — open source and integrating with antithesis. the hypothesis lineage made literal inside the company.
- 2026–bombadil · activeproperty-based testing for web and terminal uis — the second open-source satellite alongside hegel. the proprietary hypervisor stays closed; the testing libraries are the commons.
- 2026–antithesis skills for agents · activethe agent-skills repo and snouty cli — skills for research, setup, workload authoring, launch, triage, and debugging. the 2026 bet that an agent can navigate 'the sharp corners in our 8-page setup guide' and collapse onboarding cost.
- 2026breaking the wal · endedthe flagship agent-era anecdote: claude, armed with antithesis skills, reproduces sqlite's wal-reset data race — present since 2010, never organically reproduced by sqlite's team, surfaced via tailscale's 2025 production outages — in ~15 minutes, 'from my phone.'
the ecosystem
- 2025–2026the jepsen glossary · continuingthe co-authored distributed systems reliability glossary with jepsen — announced july 2025, published october — and jepsen 0.3.10's jepsen.antithesis module, pluggable rngs that 'can source entropy from an external system, like antithesis.' the rival-turned-collaborator quest.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.