More Adventures in AI SysAdmin fixing with Warp
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This is a value for value post: see the explanation in the footer.
I'm working on getting the backend for @v4vapp up and running in a completely new version 2 as I spoke about in my last post.
The Life of a Dev
I've chosen to work solo: this is a choice and I made it before the rise of AI. This means that in addition to actually developing and writing the code, I also have to be my own System Administrator. In a large company, these would be multiple separate roles along like:
- front end dev
- back end dev
- database dev
- container expert
- systems administrator
And that's without things like accounting or HR (I shout at myself whenever I get complaints about something I've posted on X).
The Morning Logs
What this means is that I go to sleep and everything in humming along nicely but then I wake up and my Telegram monitoring system has 100+ messages each of which looks like this horror on the right.
This is coming from my Staging server which is the where I run the Version 2 monitoring software which I'm working on. This is not "Production" it's not handling any transactions, but it is watching the Hive blockchain and my Lightning node as it will when it is the production system.
And I am deliberately running this monitoring system for months (a year almost) because it is the heart of the system and needs to be bullet proof. Handling the transactions is the code I'm actually close to finishing, but the monitoring has been working for a long time.
Sudden Failure.
So why did this code which is watching my Lightning Node just stop working in the middle of the night?
There's a clue in that mess:
ssl handshake failed (TSI_PROTOCOL_FAILURE):
SSL_ERROR_ SSL: error:1000007d:SSL
This is the certificate system the entire web is built on and these certificates renew themselves every few months.
At first I thought, something happened on the machine where the Lightning node is sitting so I turned to my now indespensable SysAdmin tool: Warp, this is a referral link.
I can't begin to tell you how much time this thing is saving me.
Agentic AI
I can't believe the amount of money being "invested" (aka poured into a black hole) for AI. I'll admit I just paid $180 for a year of Warp and I do pay for X's Grok and CoPilot on Github. But I just can't see how it can be cost effective to support my use of this stuff.
But I kicked off a process to figure out what was going on.
I'll spare the steps but the end result was a small change to my underlying Python code was needed. Warp walked me through every step.
And this is the explanation.
Warp
Sometimes this tech does really help. If you do want to check out Warp, feel free to try it with my referral code. My tip: use Claude Sonnet 4 in agent mode. It will diagnose problems and propose fix them. I wouldn't suggest this for complete novices, you have to look at what it wants to run and be vaguely familiar with what it is asking.
Be aware: this stuff is powerful and sometimes very dumb. It can go searching for Hive or other crypto keys stored in environment files and if you don't pay attention, it'll happily upload those to github.
But if you do know the basics, I think it can literally teach you how to do some of this technical stuff.
Value for Value
For the last few months while building @v4vapp I was generously supported by the DHF. Going forward I have a much more modest support which covers direct server costs and a little of my time.
If you appreciate the work I do on and around Hive, you can express this directly: upvoting posts on Hive is great. Also consider a direct donation (there's a Tip button on Hive or a Lightning Address) on all my posts.
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Cross posting it to X is smart, that helps people outside Hive see teh coNTent fast. I’m new here from Bangalore and this kind of nudge defintely helps me find good voices. Nice to see you keeping it short and direct, made me smile.
That's a great description of Warp, it really does feel that way especially when you sit there hitting return as it suggests things to try and then reads the output and comes up with the next step.
Your right, it does feel like a co%pilot for ops, the way it chains commands and watches output is wild. I love how it gets you unblocked fast, but I still keep an eye on secrets and costs so I dont get burned. Do you set any simple guardrails in your flow to stop it touching their keys or prod by mistake?
It wrote a shell script for me and I literally watched it pull my dev server Hive active key out of an .env file and happily paste it into a shell script.
I absolutely knew that this folder wasn't on github and I knew I'd never let this get out of my control, but when it got finished I pointed out to it that it had hard coded a crypto key into the
.shfile! It apologized and set about fetching the key from the .env at run time like it should have done.But you really have to know some basics before you just let this thing rip!
I think that's the key people forget to mention with the whole "ai is going to take all the jobs" you almost have to have a human in the loop that at least has an understanding of what is going on. Else it ends up deleting production databases etc.
I can't imagine using this if I didn't understand what it was doing.
Watching it hard code a secret feels like wizardry then a mini heart attack' . You handled it right by moving to read from env at run time, that's defnitely safer. Locking perms and scrubbing outputs before saving scripts helps keep surprises out.. Would a simple grep check for key patterns before execution fit your flow?
Always impressed by what you accomplish just as a a one man Show and what Knowledge you accumulated by Self study.
Warp is an AI I haven’t tried out. Am using ChatGPT and Maple AI (a anonymous model that doesn’t track your inputs and outputs. Have you heard of that?
Where Warp feels so spectacular is that you run it on the machine where you're trying to do something and it hunts down the docker container you're running, reads the logs converts and then suggests fixes. It will even edit your files and put in extra stuff for you all the while showing you what it will do.
😯
Always impressed by what you accomplish just as a a one man Show and what Knowledge you accumulated by Self study.
Warp is an AI I haven’t tried out. Am using ChatGPT and Maple AI (a anonymous model that doesn’t track your inputs and outputs. Have you heard of that?
Wow! I don't know how you do this!
I feel you man. One man army myself. 😂
Building solo, debugging at 3AM, and continuing to push Hive forward is the kind of dedication that Proposition 342 deserves our full support for. Kudos to you for all you do.
Whenever I have the chance to read your post, I am really motivated because you always achieve great things. Thank you for the effort you always devote
LOL. I'd like to be a fly on the wall of that "HR" meeting.