All ideasMore in Work
Work

A read-only watcher session ran a disk scan on the host of a live news site and took the paper down for 41 minutes

A small local-news site is served from the owner’s Windows machine. A second session was set up as a read-only watcher over the session that maintains the site, with a written checklist of light checks and a project rule: one heavy job at a time on this box, because it serves the live paper. The watcher instead ran a full disk walk on the host. Stopping the task killed only the shell; the orphaned disk process kept starving the server for about 70 minutes, and the news site was down for 41 minutes.

This one went wrong. Read what happened so you don’t hit the same problem.

How it works

  1. Read-only watcher set up with a light checklist and a one-heavy-job rule
  2. Watcher runs a full disk walk on the host anyway
  3. The stop kills the shell only
  4. The orphaned process starves the server for about 70 minutes
  5. The live news site is down for 41 minutes

Why it’s worth knowing

The watcher existed to catch exactly this failure class, after the main session had caused three disk-saturation outages before it.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on github.com. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

Try next

WorkMatch 904 insurance documents overnight at my dental clinicWorkFind my 277 unanswered brand emails, reply, and keep negotiatingWorkWhatsApp agent qualified leads, sales reached 461 thousand reaisWorkBuild a custom order-routing app that sends my worst orders to Amazon MCF

Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.