orca-replay

OrcaReplay

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Your agent broke something at 2am. Replay it at 9am — exactly, offline, as many times as you like.

Record any coding agent. Reproduce the run byte-for-byte with no model called. Fork it from any step onto a different model and see who gets it right.

Built by the team behind OrcaRouter — one API key and one endpoint for Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen and the rest. It is what orca setup points at by default, and what makes orca compare a single command instead of four provider accounts.

Find us: OrcaRouter All model APIs

Github Repos: OrcaCode Review · OrcaRouter Lite

Connect: X · Discord · Hugging Face · Ollama

Real output from one session — a Claude Code run recorded, replayed against the recording, then forked at checkpoint 4 onto two models and graded by npx tsc --noEmit. Nothing here is mocked up.

Try it in three commands

One npm package named orcareplay, which puts one command named orca on your PATH. There is no separate tool called "orca", and nothing is installed into your agent.

npm i -g orcareplay             # the package is orcareplay; the command it installs is orca

orca record claude              # your agent, unmodified, doing whatever it does
orca replay last                # the same run again — no network, no tokens, no charge
orca replay last --from 4 --model claude-haiku-4-5 --ui

The third line is the one people stay for: same files, same conversation prefix, different model from step 4 onward. The model is the only variable, which is what makes the answer mean anything.

The three commands at the top need an agent installed, a key, a network and real tokens. If you have none of those yet, one command brings its own:

orca quickstart

It writes a small project with a genuine bug in it and a recording of an agent fixing that bug, then replays the recording against the project with no model called: two failing tests before, four passing after, three turns served from the trace and nothing spent. --full prints the whole timeline and the replay as it happened.

Read your agent's own system prompt

A proxy that sees the whole loop also sees the prompt the harness assembled before it sent anything. One command captures it, scrubs the machine out of it, and files it by model:

node capture/capture.mjs claude --model claude-opus-5

Interactive prompts and -p prompts are not the same prompt, and neither is the same across models. See capture/README.md for the measured differences, the pitfalls, and the sanitising rules.

Why this exists

Agent debugging today is archaeology. You scroll a terminal, you re-run and get a different failure, you add print statements to someone else's harness. The tools that exist are observability tools: they tell you a run cost $4.12 and used 61k tokens, which is not the question you have. The question you have is why did it delete my migration file.

OrcaReplay answers that by giving you the run back.

The last two rows are the ones an SDK wrapper structurally cannot reach. Capture happens below the agent — at the process and socket boundary — so it does not matter whether the agent is yours, whether you can edit it, or whether it even holds an API key: a Codex CLI signed in with a ChatGPT subscription talks to its own backend over TLS, with a credential that only that backend accepts, so it cannot be pointed elsewhere and stay the same session — and orca can still record it. See when the harness will not be redirected.

How it works

Model APIs are stateless, so on every turn an agent resends the entire conversation — including the previous turn's tool results. A proxy in front of the model therefore sees the whole loop: each request, each streamed response, every tool call the model emitted, and every tool result the harness produced. That one property is what the tool is built on, and it is why OrcaReplay does not patch your agent — it stands up a local proxy, sets two environment variables, and gets out of the way.

What "egress blocked" means, exactly. On replay the proxy refuses to forward anything it cannot serve from the trace, so no model is called and no tokens are spent — that run prints egress=blocked. --loose lifts it deliberately: an unmatched request is then answered by the provider and recorded as a major divergence, and the same line reads egress=live-on-unmatched. A replay still executes the recorded tool calls for real, and a tool that opens its own socket — a shell command running curl, an MCP server fetching something — is outside the guarantee either way. By default it never reaches the proxy and goes to the network as usual. Under --tls-intercept it does reach the proxy, because that sets HTTPS_PROXY for the whole child: a host off the intercept list is tunnelled through untouched, though its hostname, port and byte counts still land in the trace, and a host on the list is refused there like any other unmatched call. Replay is not a sandbox; if you need one, run it inside one.

Three more layers catch what the protocol cannot see: an exit code, a real duration, which stream a byte came out of, a file written without telling anyone. A fifth exists for the agents that read no base-URL variable at all — see which agents. A sixth reads the agent's own account of its structure, for a harness that has one: which sub-agent ran, which handed off to which, whether a guardrail tripped, which graph node produced what and which of them called no model at all — none of which reaches the wire.

%%{init: {'theme':'neutral'}}%%
flowchart LR
    A["<b>your agent</b><br/><i>unmodified</i>"]

    subgraph orca["orca · six capture layers"]
        direction TB
        P["<b>proxy</b><br/>base-URL env var"]