Topical Takes
Short, opinionated posts on eBPF, Linux internals, and the tools we all run in production.
How to Debug Runtime Errors in Production (2026): When the Stack Trace Isn't Enough
A stack trace tells you where your code was when it crashed, not what the machine was doing to it. The runtime errors that hurt most in production, an OOM kill, a SIGKILL, ENOSPC, EACCES, often leave no application trace at all because the kernel ended the process. Here is how to debug the runtime errors a breakpoint cannot reach.
Top 7 Runtime Debugging Tools for Linux in 2026 (and the One Built for AI Agents)
Runtime debugging means inspecting a program while it runs in production, and the tools split on one line: whether they see inside one application you instrumented, or the whole running machine from the kernel. Seven runtime debugging tools ranked on that axis, including the only one you can hand to an AI agent to investigate a live host.
How Do I Let Claude Investigate Production on Linux? (2026)
Claude Code runs on your laptop and production is somewhere else, so investigating it means SSH, a bastion or an MCP server, and each has a different blast radius. Which permission mode fails closed, why a developer's settings.json is a preference and managed-settings.json is a control, what deny rules survive, and where Claude's own permission system stops mattering.
How to Let an AI Agent Fix Something in Production Safely (2026)
A fix and an incident are the same syscalls, so the question is not whether the agent is trustworthy but what it can reach, what you can undo, and what you can prove afterward. What Replit's own documentation changed after an agent deleted a production database during a code freeze, why an instruction is not a control, and how to keep a record of an agent's changes that the agent did not write.