Just to wind down from a busy week, I thought it would be nice to jot down an update about the Critter Stack and JasperFx roadmap as it looks like right now for the rest of the year.
We’ve had a torrid release cadence this whole year with the big highlight being the “Critter Stack 2026” wave of major releases, then quite a few follow up releases to add more features and improve performance and resilience. The real goal of this year for JasperFx was to finally release…
CritterWatch
CritterWatch has ended up being a much, much larger and more ambitious tool than originally conceived as the advent of AI assisted development really changed everything. CritterWatch is absolutely going to still be the management and observability console for the Critter Watch as it was originally conceived. Now though, it will also serve as the central hub of AI assisted development and support for the Critter Stack.
For timing, I’m calling:
- 1.0 RC 1 for this Monday, July 27th
- The official, 1.0 GA is targeted for Monday, August 3rd
And of course, incremental releases with new features throughout the rest of the year and to deal with the inevitable feedback once it’s being used by more people. Here are some ideas currently in our backlog for a “1.1” release:
- Some kind of recurring cron-based message scheduling with deep integration of Wolverine with Quartz.Net and/or TickerQ. I’m currently thinking that Hangfire is just its own huge thing and not looking to mess with that. It’s quite possible that Wolverine gets first class documentation and integration for Quartz.Net and TickerQ first, then the CritterWatch integration is really just provides management and observability over that.
- Scheduling projection rebuilds or other management actions for off hours
- More integration for Event Modeling visualizations and code generation? We’re going to have quite a bit of visualization of the cause and effect of a system right off the bat, but we’ll also be moving more into development time assistance. I don’t have any details about what exactly that’s going to be yet.
Spec Driven Development, AI Assisted Development, and Event Modeling
Every major Event Sourcing tool company or community is working on some sort of approach for AI assisted development, and we’re already well into that ourselves. I think a lot of how people see AI usage in development is almost completely a reflection of where their opinions about software development before AI.
For myself, I was hugely influenced by Extreme Programming and I’ve long been deeply skeptical of Model Driven Development or really any kind of purported “low code” approach to software development. That’s carried over to also being unenthusiastic about any approach for generating event sourced applications by first modeling in some kind of custom XML or YAML format or some kind of external DSL. I’m also admittedly dubious about any kind of user interface tooling to generate code. Moreover, I tend to scoff at a lot of these tools as taking more time to do the intermediate model than it would to just write the code with the Critter Stack and our very low code ceremony model.
Instead, JasperFx will be leaning toward much more code centric approaches:
- Using what we used to call “Executable Specifications” (BDD) for AI assisted development and building tooling to reduce the effort to do so. Right now we’re pursuing Gherkin based tooling as at least one alternative, but we’re not locked into only doing that.
- Expanding the already existing tooling in CritterWatch for visualizing event sourcing code through the Event Modeling notation at development time or even live in requirements workshops with domain experts rather than generating code from the intermediate models.
And as always, we put a lot of emphasis on low code ceremony approaches as is.
I do actually admire what KurrentDb is doing so far with their Capacitor tool and I’m interested in building out our tooling, but that might be a “build your own lightsaber” learning experience or something very optimized for JasperFx’s own development on the Critter Stack.
Spaghetti against the Wall?
Alright, now it’s time for farther out ideas that aren’t even remotely fleshed out just to see what other folks would find compelling:
- Improve Wolverine’s story for long running workflows, meaning tasks that might take hours and can’t be done as a single message. I think a huge chunk of this is just having more documentation and examples for already existing capabilities, but I think there’s also an opportunity to exploit Wolverine’s virtual actor subsystem to expand into Temporal.io type territory
- Maybe a JasperFx curated Hot Chocolate package. Not taking anything away from ChiliCream, but I know there’s performance fat in the Marten integration and repetitive code for integrating Wolverine into Hot Chocolate mutations. I have zero interest in a full blown GraphQL product, but it’s something I’ve thought about from time to time
- Integrating caching options into Wolverine, but that’s low hanging fruit
What else folks? What would you like to see improved or added?
The Shade Tree Developer 