pi-sre-mode

An incident investigation mode for Pi. Open a terminal, start an incident, investigate with real tools, write a report — all without leaving Pi.

Why

During an incident you're juggling metrics dashboards, log viewers, SSH sessions, and a dozen browser tabs. pi-sre-mode puts the investigation loop inside Pi so you can query metrics, grep logs, check service health, and build a timeline in one place.

It ships read-only guardrails by default so you don't accidentally rm or systemctl restart something mid-investigation.

What you get

• /incident — set up investigation context: pick a template (5xx spike, high latency, OOM, etc.), name the service, set a time window. That context follows every subsequent prompt automatically.
• /check-connectors — preflight check that your CLIs, auth, and environment are ready before you start digging.
• /report — turn the investigation into a markdown report.
• /sudo / /sudo-off — bypass or re-enable the read-only guardrails when you need to.
• Built-in investigation skills — SRE methodology and a generic investigation playbook that guide Pi's reasoning.
• 7 incident templates — 5xx spike, high latency, OOM/crash loop, broker issues, service down, deploy regression, resource exhaustion, plus a blank "custom" template.

Quick start

Install globally:

pi install npm:pi-sre-mode

Or add to ~/.pi/agent/settings.json:

{
  "packages": ["npm:pi-sre-mode"]
}

Then in Pi:

/check-connectors          # verify your environment
/incident                  # set up context — pick a template, name the service
investigate elevated p99 for payments-api, start with the timeline
/report                    # generate a markdown report

You don't always need /incident

Use plain Pi for quick questions:

• "check p99 latency for payments-api over the last 2h"
• "compare error rates before and after the last deploy"
• "summarize the Nomad allocation restarts today"

Use /incident when you want persistent context, a structured template, guardrails, and a report at the end.

Private overlays

The public package is generic on purpose. Your team's topology, runbooks, and internal tooling live in a private overlay — a separate Pi package that layers org-specific templates, skills, prompts, connector checks, and report paths on top.

Install an overlay per-project:

pi install -l git:git@github.com:your-org/pi-sre-overlay.git

See the overlay guide for how to build one.

Read-only by default

During an active incident, pi-sre-mode blocks:

• file writes and edits
• rm, mv, sudo, kill, chmod, chown
• systemctl restart/stop, nomad job run/stop
• mutating AWS CLI commands (create, delete, terminate, etc.)
• shell trampolines (bash -c, eval, subshells)

Use /sudo to temporarily disable these guardrails. /sudo-off re-enables them.

Commands

Command	Purpose
/incident	Start or update investigation context
/incident-reset	Clear incident context
/check-connectors	Run environment preflight checks
/report	Generate a markdown investigation report
/sudo	Bypass read-only guardrails
/sudo-off	Re-enable read-only guardrails

How it works

pi-sre-mode is built entirely on Pi's extension API — no external server, no separate UI, no agent framework. Everything runs inside your Pi session.

• Prompt injection — when incident mode is active, before_agent_start automatically prepends the incident context (template, service, time window, guardrails) to every prompt. Pi investigates with full awareness of what you're looking at.
• Tool interception — tool_call hooks inspect every command before execution and block dangerous ones. This is how read-only guardrails work without a custom sandbox.
• Session state — incident context is persisted in Pi's session entries, so it survives reloads, branches, and forks. Navigate the session tree and your incident follows.
• Interactive UI — /incident uses Pi's built-in select, input, and confirm primitives for the setup wizard. Status line and widget show the active incident at a glance.
• Inter-extension events — overlays register themselves by emitting events that the public package listens for. No tight coupling, no imports between packages.
• Skills and prompts — shipped as standard Pi skills/prompts in the package manifest. Pi discovers them automatically.

This means the extension is thin orchestration. The real value is in the skills, prompts, and templates — content that's easy to write and easy to override.

Docs

• Getting started
• Building an overlay
• Installation patterns
• Troubleshooting

Examples

• examples/local-overlay/ — minimal overlay for testing
• examples/smoke-test/ — automated smoke test via Pi RPC

Local development

{
  "packages": [
    "/path/to/pi-sre-mode",
    "/path/to/your-overlay"
  ]
}

# public package only
bun run smoke-test -- --public-only

# with an overlay
bun run smoke-test -- --overlay /path/to/private-overlay