doctor docs

#What is doctor?

Your agents' memory runs on local daemons. A daemon that quietly dies at 2am costs you the next morning: a session that forgot everything, and twenty minutes re-explaining a codebase your agent knew yesterday. doctor exists so that never happens to you again.

doctor is the watchdog for the apiary stack. Your operating system supervises doctor, and doctor supervises everything else. Because it stands outside the things it watches, it never depends on them to stay alive. It is small on purpose: no third-party dependencies, built from your platform's own building blocks, and harder to kill than anything it watches.

#Who it is for

Anyone running the apiary stack whose agents' memory depends on local daemons. You install it once and mostly forget it exists.

The person who lives with the install. doctor is built for the morning after, not the demo. It is quiet on a good day and loud, in a useful way, on a bad one.

#What you actually get

• Watching, every 30 seconds. Each daemon gets checked, and doctor learns not just that something is wrong but what kind of wrong: down, wedged, or degraded in a specific part.
• Healing, on a ladder. Restart first, reinstall if restarts keep failing, remove a conflicting package if one is detected, back off between tries, stop the instant health returns.
• Silence when things are fine. A healthy check is a single log line. No nagging, no notifications, no updates on a good day.
• A plain report when it's stuck. When the ladder runs out, doctor writes what it found, every step it tried, and what it recommends, and shows it on a local status page.
• Safe updates. The memory daemon updates only behind an approved-release gate, with a verify-then-rollback step. doctor never updates its own package on its own.
• No path to your credentials. There is no code in doctor that can read or delete your credentials file.

#Where to start

• New here? Walk through Getting started to install doctor and prove it heals.
• Want the mental model first? Read How doctor works for the watch, classify, and heal loop.
• Scripting or checking a surface? The command reference covers every command and address.
• Have a quick question? Check the FAQ.

#Common questions

Does doctor need admin rights? No. It registers per user by default on all three platforms, a launch agent on macOS, a user service on Linux, a per-user scheduled task on Windows. No sudo, no admin prompt.

What if doctor itself crashes? Your operating system restarts it. doctor is supervised by the OS, not by anything in the stack it watches. That's the whole point of the design.

Is doctor part of a bigger product? Yes. doctor is the watchdog of the apiary, the shared toolset that also includes honeycomb, nectar, and hive. It installs with the rest of the stack and keeps the other daemons alive.