17 comments

  • zenoprax 1 hour ago
    > witr is successful if users trust it during incidents.

    > This project was developed with assistance from AI/LLMs [...] supervised by a human who occasionally knew what he was doing.

    This seems contradictory to me.

    • zephyreon 3 minutes ago
      The last bit

      > supervised by a human who occasionally knew what he was doing.

      seems in jest but I could be wrong. If omitted or flagged as actual sarcasm I would feel a lot better about the project overall. As long as you’re auditing the LLM’s outputs and doing a decent code review I think it’s reasonable to trust this tool during incidents.

      I’ll admit I did go straight to the end of the readme to look for this exact statement. I appreciate they chose to disclose.

  • mh- 6 hours ago
    This is great. Small, trivial suggestion: the gif that loops in the README should pause on the screen w/ the output for a few seconds longer - it disappears (restarts) too quickly to take in all of the output.
    • godelski 2 hours ago

        > the gif that loops in the README should pause on the screen
      
      Honestly, I think a screenshot is better than a gif. That last frame says everything you need.
    • Neywiny 5 hours ago
      I would also argue it shouldn't be a gif. It's nice that it shows the command is fast I guess but it's one command that's still visible in the final frame. Not as bandwidth efficient and agreed I can't read it all in time
    • rzzzt 4 hours ago
      Also the pause button seems to take the GIF back to its first frame, then resume from where I paused... either that or I need a good sleep.
    • stavros 6 hours ago
      https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs is a really good utility for automatically making these gifs.
      • sestep 5 hours ago
        I'm a big fan of svg-term myself: https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli
        • stavros 4 hours ago
          Hm, very interesting! This only converts asciinema recordings, though, right? It doesn't automatically record anything?
          • sestep 4 hours ago
            If you have asciinema already installed then you can invoke it through svg-term like this!

              svg-term --command 'cowsay hey there'
            
            But that has the aforementioned issues about not pausing enough, so I usually just record with asciinema first and then invoke svg-term.
  • pranshuparmar 13 hours ago
    A quick note on scope: this is not meant to replace existing monitoring or observability tools. It’s designed for those moments when you SSH into a box and need to quickly understand “why is this running” without digging through configs, cron jobs, or service trees manually.

    Happy to answer questions or adjust direction based on feedback.

    • dcminter 8 hours ago
      This is very clever. I've often needed to figure out what some running process was actually for (e.g. because it just started consuming a lot of some limited resource) but it never occurred to me that one could have a tool to answer that question. Well done.

      ---

      Edit: Ah, ok, I slightly misunderstood - skimmed the README too quickly. I thought it was also explaining what the process did :D Still a clever tool, but thought it went a step further.

      Perhaps you should add that though - combine Man page output with a database of known processes that run on various Linux systems and a mechanism for contributing PRs to extend that database...? Unlesss it's just me that often wants to know "what the fsck does /tmp/hax0r/deeploysketchyd actually do?" :P

      • filterfish 25 minutes ago
        Looking up the binary in the package management system would also provide another source of useful information. Of course this would dramatically increase the complexity but would, I think, be useful.

        If you could look it up using APT/dpkg first, that would be lovely :-)

  • vzaliva 3 hours ago
    Sounds like something I could use, but installing a binary via `curl` doesn't sit right with me. Next problem you have is "explain how this thing was installed on my system" followed "is it up to date (including security patches).

    I hope they have deb package or snap some day.

    • fouc 3 hours ago
      new utility command coming soon! wdtci - "what does this curl install?"
    • klooney 2 hours ago
      `systemctl status $pid` will get you a lot
  • DougN7 6 hours ago
    What does this means for context: “Git repository name and branch” Does this mean it detects if something is running from within a git repository folder? Couldn’t find the code that checked this.
  • be_erik 5 hours ago
    If you're looking to build and install this from source, here's the incantation:

    CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -ldflags "-X main.version=dev -X main.commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X 'main.buildDate=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)'" -o witr ./cmd/witr

    Call me old-fashioned, but if there's an install.sh, I would hope it would prefer the local src over binaries.

    Very cool utility! Simple tools like these keep me glued to the terminal. Thank you!

  • TheCraiggers 8 hours ago
    This is amazing. Thank you for sharing this.

    Do you have any qualms about me making an entry in the AUR for this?

    • giancarlostoro 7 hours ago
      Im not the author but I would love for an AUR made for this ;)

      My favorite thing about arch is how insanely quickly AURs pop up for interesting tools.

  • techsystems 6 hours ago
    I'm really loving this!

    'Responsibility chain' will become a trendy phrase.

  • properbrew 4 hours ago
    This is extremely useful, will be added to the toolbox. Thanks for sharing.
  • 4ggr0 8 hours ago
    i definitely see the use for it, lots of moments where i wonder how or why something was started.
  • fracus 2 hours ago
    I really like this. Something like this should already exist, stock.
  • wyldfire 5 hours ago
    `ps uaxf` gives me pretty similar output.
  • q2dg 8 hours ago
    pstree doesn't answer the why?
  • Saris 9 hours ago
    This looks very handy to have around!
  • dontdieych 8 hours ago
    Nice and installed then starred.
  • canxerian 9 hours ago
    Great idea!
  • pcdoodle 3 hours ago
    [dead]