3 flies 路 2 incidents 路 1 pager
Fly NOC
3 AM On-Call
Three fruit fly brains run production. The pager strobe fires their escape reflex, and that spike is the ACK. Then coffee drives their feeding neurons, and every strong burst types one character of the fix.
MVP
| Fly | Total MTTR |
|---|---|
| Sudo | 11.00 s |
| Grep | 11.70 s |
| Cron | 12.10 s |
Lowest total time to repair across both incidents.
How the brain is on call
- ACK. The pager strobe drives LC4 and LPLC2 at 150 Hz for 0.4 s. The fly acknowledges at the 10th giant-fiber (DNp01) spike inside 50 ms, so the ack time is a real spike time.
- Type. After the ack, coffee on the mouthparts drives the sugar taste neurons (LB3). Each 100 ms window with 24 or more spikes from the feeding motor neurons MN10 and MNx01 types one character; the last one is Enter.
- Cold coffee. The second incident has a longer command and colder coffee (less sugar), so the feeding neurons cross the bar less often.
- Game-side. The incidents, the commands, the keystroke threshold, the sugar rates, the room and the camera.
Fly brain video
Fly NOC: 3 AM On-Call
Three fly brains, one pager, two incidents.
Sudo, Cron and Grep are on call. Each one is the same complete FlyWire fruit fly brain, 138,639 spiking neurons, simulated with the Shiu et al. 2024 model. Nothing is trained. At 2:47 AM nginx goes down on all three web servers; at 3:12 a bad deploy breaks the API.
The pager strobe is a flash into the fly's looming neurons, and the giant fiber, its escape reflex, fires: that spike time is the acknowledgement. Then the fly sips its coffee. Sugar drives the feeding motor neurons, the proboscis taps the keyboard, and every 100 ms burst strong enough types one character of the fix. The terminal on each desk shows exactly what its brain has typed.
02:47 路 Nginx Down 路 sudo systemctl restart nginx (hot coffee)
| Place | Fly | Host | ACK | MTTR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cron | web-02 | 127 ms | 4.20 s |
| 2 | Grep | web-03 | 128 ms | 4.70 s |
| 3 | Sudo | web-01 | 130 ms | 5.70 s |
03:12 路 Bad Deploy 路 kubectl rollout undo deploy/api (cold coffee)
| Place | Fly | Host | ACK | MTTR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sudo | api-01 | 127 ms | 5.30 s |
| 2 | Grep | api-03 | 131 ms | 7.00 s |
| 3 | Cron | api-02 | 129 ms | 7.90 s |
What is real and what is not. The ack times and every keystroke come from simulated spikes. The three flies are the same connectome run one after another on the same network, reset before each incident, so the differences between them are neural noise. The servers, the commands, the room and the camera are game rules. No brain ran away.
Music: "Boss Battle #9 [Metal]" by nene, CC0 via OpenGameArt (the monster-truck semifinal bed).