Show HN: Savvy – Create, Share and Run Runbooks from your Terminal | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Savvy – Create, Share and Run Runbooks from your Terminal

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83 pointsjoshi426 comments

Savvy's CLI allows you to create, share, and run runbooks from your terminal.

Savvy(getsavvy.so) natively integrates with modern LLMs and reduces the time to create a great runbook from minutes and hours to seconds.

Savvy supports creating runbooks entirely with AI(savvy ask) or a human in the loop(savvy record.)

Savvy Ask: Generate entire runbooks or a single command using natural language.

Savvy Record: This creates a new subshell that automatically expands all aliases before recording commands locally. These commands are then sent to an LLM, which generates the first version of your runbook.

Savvy Record History: This command allows you to go back in time and select commands from your recent shell history. There's no need to repeat the work you've already done.

Runbooks are private by default, but you can share them with your team using a link(for now) or export them to markdown.

Savvy Explain: Savvy explain generates a simple and easy-to-understand explanation for any command or error message before you can say RTFM!

Savvy Run: Use `savvy run` to search and run runbooks right from your terminal. Once you select a runbook, Savvy automatically fills in the next command to execute. Just press enter to run it.

Savvy's README has more details and demos for everything I just mentioned.

Savvy's free, and anyone can try it out today.

Install Savvy by running: curl -fsSL https://install.getsavvy.so | sh

If you try Savvy, I'd love your feedback on the product.

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This thread feels astroturfed, or at least like some overly enthusiastic friend-posting.

Buncha low activity accounts posting marketing copy style testimonials.

I’m not saying it was necessarily intentional manipulation, but it feels off for a Show HN.

No kidding. Several comments are from account less than 24 hours old and very low effort. I wonder if the author reached out to friends to give positive reviews or (being cynical) hired someone to bloat the comments.

In either case, it's a bad look for what looks like a cool product and they may have seriously misread the user base of HN, who do _not_ like to be duped.

I spent about two minutes looking at it, I have no idea what a runbook is or what this project does and is used for.

"From fixing prod to local dev..." ?????

You're right. My post assumes too much prior knowledge.

A runbook is a set of precise commands that you can use to resolve or diagnose anything from a complete production outage to helping a developer debug their local environment.

Most developers manually create runbooks - Savvy's CLI changes that and allows you to create runbooks in seconds.

Here's an example runbook that shows how you can extract an x509 cert from a config map and verify its validity: https://app.getsavvy.so/runbook/rb_72e6b7d29ae70abe/How-To-V...

So it’s a bash script?

> A runbook is a set of precise commands...

Not really? That's a shell script. A runbook includes context, prerequisites, and troubleshooting steps, not just commands. Also, it's generally considered manual.

FWIW, replying to one of your other comments, a playbook is generally considered a more automated runbook, with branching plays based on conditionals, bridging from a runbook world to an automation word; that's why Ansible used the term.

What makes a runbook a runbook are the detailed instructions, including prerequisites, step-by-step procedures, screenshots, and even troubleshooting tips, to help the user run the `precise commands` with consistency and reliability in operational use on systems that are never quite right and when the user who needs to perform these specific tasks reliably doesn't have enough technical knowledge to even know if they're doing them right.

I like the idea -- but what if you rethought it to check in with the user step by step, telling them what they're about to do next, then co-looking at the results they get to see if it's working or if they've lost the plot and need to replan?

You're right. A runbook is more than just a list of commands.

I plan to add support for setting up and validating prerequisites for running a runbook with Savvy. For example, Savvy can ensure that all environment variables are automatically set up and removed as part of a `savvy run.`

A while ago, I built Flowshare, which is similar to Savvy but works in the browser. I will integrate that tech within Savvy to support capturing runbooks that involve steps in the browser and the terminal.

I like your suggestion on troubleshooting. Savvy can offer a great experience here as the cli will know when a command has failed or returned a nonzero exit code.

> but what if you rethought it to check in with the user step by step, telling them what they're about to do next

IIUC, your thoughts align with how Savvy Run currently works. Savvy suggests the next step, but devs can edit or ignore it. Providing troubleshooting help, as you suggested, will definitely improve the DX.

TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runbook

Runbooks or playbooks are often used interchangeably.

I went with Runbooks since a playbook is usually something more abstract. For e.g

A playbook might say: "restart the ec2 server," but a Runbook will list the exact sequence of commands you can run to restart a server.

I am an active customer of Savvy. With savvy, I am able to offload a lot of operations tasks we were afraid of delegating to ops team before because of two reasons - 1. Training our team was difficult. Now the ops team finds the assistance due to savvy run very helpful. 2. We have insights into what our ops team is doing.

Hoping to scale savvy to more use cases as they role out features that create and destroy environment variables automatically. This will reduce the chance of secret leakage.

I've been using savvy for a few weeks now. As part of my work I end up doing a lot of adhoc scripting on the command line and savvy ask has been pretty useful for that. I use it more like a GitHub copilot right now and just like copilot it feels like collaborating with another eng (keeps me in the flow and avoid getting distracted). I expect that my usage will transition towards the runbook features as our startup grows and the tech stack mature

This would be great at work, but most orgs would never allow some terminal app to connect out to an LLM we've never heard of and have no understanding of the privacy of, especially for difficult to quantify efficiency gains.

Would you ever consider a version that allows redirecting to a locally hosted LLM server?

I'm currently using GPT4-o via OpenAI's API.

I've been looking at ollama for a bit and I think I will ship an integration with Savvy at some point.

For enterprises, I think it makes sense to support a company approved LLM API endpoint in addition to local LLMs.

I'm happy to answer any questions you have around privacy too.

been using savvy for a bit - shantanu gave me early access!

love how simple it is to use, personally been loving the savvy ask/explain in the last couple of weeks - been super easy to ask questions in the terminal and just get answers

but the history is quite good too, very cool to share notebooks with others on the team

Thanks for all the feedback so far!

This product looks really cool! But I would have to know more about the pricing model before I could recommend it at work. Also, does it work across SSH sessions? ie can I shell into a different machine as part of the runbook?

Savvy doesn't have SSH support, but I'm working to add it soon.

I think we can make SSH support work without installing Savvy on the remote machine, but I'm still working through the details.

I'm laser-focused on nailing the DX and making sure it delivers a lot of value to our users.

If you're up for it, I'd love to chat and learn more about how Savvy can help you personally and at work - my email is shantanu@getsavvy.so

Excited to try it. How does it do with privacy? Are my runbooks used to train any models?

(Savvy's founder here) Nope, we don't train any models on user data.

Let me know how it goes!

I had the same question. What do you do with user data? Are my commands, output, or other data sent to your database? I work with PHI so have to be careful with tools like this. At the same time it looks incredibly useful and easy to use!

We don't see or store the output of your commands at all.

Your commands and the AI generated text for runbooks created using savvy record and savvy record history are stored in the database.

All data in the DB is encrypted at rest and during transit.

Any runbook, commands, or explanations generated with savvy ask/explain are ephemeral and not stored in our DB.

I run a small startup and I've been using Savvy for a few months to help our team with repetitive commands around deploying and testing. Very happy early user and excited for what's ahead here!

love the problem you are trying to solve, shantanu. in moments of crisis this will be such a life saver for teams

The DX is very natural. It lacks certain important features but I guess it will get there.

Awesome work! Just what I needed.

very cool, perfect to create robotics/ROS runbooks

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