Hi HN! In the past few months my team and I have been working on Tusk Drift, a system that records real API traffic from your service, then replays those requests as deterministic tests. Outbound I/O (databases, HTTP calls, etc.) gets automatically mocked using the recorded data.

Problem we're trying to solve: Writing API tests is tedious, and hand-written mocks drift from reality. We wanted tests that stay realistic because they come from real traffic.

versus mocking libraries: Tools like VCR/Nock intercept HTTP within your tests. Tusk Drift records full request/response traces externally (HTTP, DB, Redis, etc.) and replays them against your running service, no test code or fixtures to write/maintain.

How it works:

1. Add a lightweight SDK (we currently support Python and Node.js)

2. Record traffic in any environment.

3. Run `tusk run`, the CLI sandboxes your service and serves mocks via Unix socket

We run this in CI on every PR. Also been using it as a test harness for AI coding agents, they can make changes, run `tusk run`, and get immediate feedback without needing live dependencies.

Source: https://github.com/Use-Tusk/tusk-drift-cli

Demo: https://github.com/Use-Tusk/drift-node-demo

Happy to answer questions!