doctor FAQ

Short answers to the common questions about doctor.

#Does doctor need admin rights?

No. doctor registers per user by default on all three platforms: a launch agent on macOS, a user service on Linux, and 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.

#Will it update things behind my back?

Only the memory daemon, only behind the approved-release gate, and only if you haven't opted out. doctor never updates its own package automatically. You can opt out of auto-update with a flag, an environment variable, or a pinned version.

#Can it break my install worse than it found it?

The risky repairs are gated. Reinstalls are serialized behind a lock, verified afterward, and rolled back on a failed verify. The one genuinely destructive action, removing a conflicting package, writes an audit record first and never touches your data directories.

#How do I turn it off?

Run doctor uninstall-service. This removes the OS registration and doctor stops watching. The stack keeps running; you're just back to being your own on-call.

#Does it touch my credentials?

No. There is no code path in doctor that reads, writes, or deletes your credentials file. If it suspects a credential problem, it tells you and stops. There is deliberately no command to clear credentials.

#Is the status page exposed to the network?

No. It is served on your machine only, at 127.0.0.1:3852. Nothing is exposed to the network. It works even when everything else is down, which is exactly when you need it.

#How do I prove it actually works?

Kill a daemon on purpose, wait about 30 seconds, and check its status with doctor status. It comes back healthy with a fresh note of the last heal.

#What telemetry leaves my machine?

When doctor genuinely can't heal an install, it can send a scrubbed diagnosis, step outcomes and version numbers, so problems get fixed proactively. Never credentials, tokens, file contents, or your code. Opt out with DO_NOT_TRACK=1, HONEYCOMB_TELEMETRY=0, or the dashboard.

#Is it production ready?

Yes. doctor is production ready and versions independently of the rest of the stack.

#Common questions

Does doctor need admin rights? No, it registers per user on all three platforms with no sudo or admin prompt.

Will it update things behind my back? Only the memory daemon, only behind the approved-release gate, never its own package automatically.

Is the status page exposed to the network? No, it's served on your machine only, at 127.0.0.1:3852.