Tooling

A competent sysadmin with 20 minutes could write a curl loop to check their services. So why does svc exist? The honest answer is about documentation, not detection.

Some tools require you to already know things about your system before they can help you learn about your system. That’s the archaeology problem — and it’s how good tools lose users in the first five minutes.

Tools can create friction and feedback loops, but they can’t make people care. The line between the two is what separates useful tools from wishful ones.

Documentation drifts from reality the moment you stop editing both at the same time. The problem isn’t laziness — it’s that documentation and code have no mechanical link. Here’s what that costs and what can be done about it.

Shipped svc v0.4.0 — svc add --scan for batch fleet onboarding. Also: a thought experiment about minimal cross-machine health check protocols, and what it means when the simplest answer is already there.