Automation should feel like cheating. Join me for fast, practical tips that turn your terminal into a superpower.
Memory Manners
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Happy Friday! Recently I’ve been encountering a frustrating scenario where my coding agents get a bit too enthusiastic and write some integration test logic that ends up in an infinite loop, consuming all of my system resources, crashing my desktop, and ultimately freezing the machine. Ahh, technology! I looked to my toolkit to see what the simplest way to prevent this would be, without having to overly complicate my setup. I knew systemd has a bunch of isolation utilities, so I figured it would be a good place to start. It turns out it had just the tool I needed. Giving it a budgetYou probably primarily interact with systemd (if you interact with systemd) through For example: systemd-run --user --scope \ -p MemoryMax=12G \ -p OOMPolicy=continue \ -- claude This runs Claude Code in a temporary group with a 12G memory ceiling. Importantly, it isn’t allocating the 12G up front, it is just the max. If the workload can’t stay under the ceiling, the kernel can kill the proccesses to free up the memory. systemd runs the command in a temporary group, and any processes it spins up, like the tests, also belong to the group and they all share the same resource budget. Of course, the kernel might kill the offending test or it might kill the agent. In either case it helps safeguard against the machine blowing up which is a win in my book. Convenience scriptAs with most handy commands, I’ve wrapped it into a little helper script called agent-run claudeor agent-run ompI only have it limiting memory, but systemd supports more like CPU limits, max number of processes and threads, and even I/O should you desire it. I’ve put the simple script up as a Gist if you want it. Of course, this isn’t specific to AI agents. This same approach works for any memory-hungry commands you’d like to give a budget. I wish I had though to do this sooner before all of the restarts… – Logan / Terminal Velocity |
Terminal Velocity
Automation should feel like cheating. Join me for fast, practical tips that turn your terminal into a superpower.
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