BugForge

About BugForge

Inspiration

I have spent a lot of time working with software crashes, fuzzing, and debugging, and I noticed that finding a crash is often only the beginning. A crash log can contain hundreds of lines, many crashes can be duplicates, and reproducing a failure can take a lot of manual work.

That inspired me to build BugForge — a tool that helps turn raw crashes into structured, reproducible, and understandable bug reports.

What I Built

BugForge provides an automated crash-analysis workflow that can:

Parse crash logs and stack traces
Detect crashes such as "SIGSEGV", "SIGABRT", "DCHECK", and fatal errors
Generate crash fingerprints
Identify duplicate crashes
Minimize testcases
Attempt reproduction
Generate JSON and Markdown reports
Track findings through a web dashboard
Provide a CLI for automation

The workflow is:

Crash ↓ Parse ↓ Fingerprint ↓ Deduplicate ↓ Minimize ↓ Reproduce ↓ Analyze ↓ Generate Report

How I Built It

I designed BugForge as a modular system so that additional runtimes, crash formats, and analysis techniques can be added later.

The CLI is the main entry point, while the analysis engine handles parsing, fingerprinting, deduplication, minimization, and reproduction. I also designed a web dashboard to make large numbers of crashes easier to investigate.

I focused on making the core workflow work with real crash data rather than simulated results.

What I Learned

While building BugForge, I learned that detecting a crash is only one part of the problem.

The more difficult questions are:

Is this crash unique?
Can I reproduce it?
Which parts of the stack trace actually matter?
Can I minimize the testcase without losing the crash?
How can I organize thousands of crashes into useful findings?

Working on these problems helped me better understand crash analysis, reproducibility, testcase minimization, and the importance of deterministic crash fingerprints.

Challenges I Faced

As a solo developer, one of the biggest challenges was designing and implementing the entire system myself — from the CLI and analysis engine to the dashboard and reporting system.

Another challenge was handling different crash formats and making the analysis useful even when crash logs contain incomplete or inconsistent information.

Testcase minimization was also challenging because reducing a testcase is only useful if the original failure can still be reproduced.

I had to balance accuracy, performance, and simplicity while building the project within the limited time available for the hackathon.

What's Next

I want BugForge to support more runtimes, crash formats, fuzzing engines, and advanced testcase-reduction techniques.

My long-term goal is to make the process of going from:

“The program crashed.”

to:

“Here is a minimized, reproducible, actionable bug report.”

as automated as possible.