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Chips

Operate

chipsd is one process, with two storage profiles: SQLite and local files, or Postgres, Redis and an object store. The Mac mini setup and the cloud setup are the same software.

  • A Mac mini: the solo server, reachable from your laptop and your phone, started with the machine, with a harness beside it.
  • The chips command: serve, pair, connect, doctor, conformance, export, import.
  • Chips for Mac: the desktop app, finding a server and pairing with it.
  • People: inviting somebody, roles, passkeys, and a person’s devices.
  • Notifications: the three tiers, quiet hours, a word per harness — yours on every device, and a banner raised once.
  • The relay: a phone away from home reaches your server through a switchboard that forwards ciphertext and reads none of it.
  • Tailscale: your server on your tailnet, over HTTPS, so a browser pairs and a passkey works from any of your devices.
  • Your own domain: your server at a name you own, over HTTPS from anywhere, with Caddy on the Mac or Cloudflare Tunnel, and what that puts on the internet.
  • Chips on your phone: approve, deny and steer from a phone, over your own network or through the relay.
  • Install: how to run it, and every configuration variable.
  • What Chips counts: your server and the apps send us nothing; the hosted relay keeps a count for each day, never who.

What to watch

Section titled “What to watch”

Metrics go through the OpenTelemetry API from the first release, and record nothing until you register an exporter — there is no telemetry by default and none is planned without an opt-in decided in the open (What Chips counts).

Metric Why it matters
chips.events.appended The throughput of the log, which is the throughput of everything.
chips.fanout.latency Append to delivery. Budget: under 100 ms at p95 with 100 harnesses.
chips.approvals.pending How many decisions are waiting on a person.
chips.approvals.age How long they waited. A rising p95 is the first sign of an overloaded human.
chips.sockets.open Connected clients and harnesses.
chips.jobs.queue_depth Media work falling behind.

Logs

Section titled “Logs”

Structured JSON, one object per line, carrying the request, run and lane ids so a slow approval can be followed end to end. No personal data by default. Tokens, signatures, authorization headers and anything called secret are redacted at every nesting depth.

CHIPS_LOG_PRETTY=true gives human-readable output for a terminal.

Backups

Section titled “Backups”

The event log is the truth, so a backup of the database is a backup of everything. In solo mode that is one SQLite file plus the attachment directory, and chips export writes both to a folder that chips import reads back with every projection rebuilt from the log. The process is safe to kill at any moment: nothing is written outside a transaction.

Budgets and limits

Section titled “Budgets and limits”

Message size, attachment size, pending approvals per harness, the signed URL’s life and the socket’s heartbeat are configuration, with defaults that suit one person and a handful of harnesses. See Configuration. Under the attachment ceiling, an owner or an admin caps photos, videos and files separately from You → Attachments in the app, on the desktop or on the phone; that is the workspace’s own setting, kept in the log.