Agent skill#

skills/ajmx is an agent skill that teaches an AI agent how to look inside a JVM with ajmx. Add it with one of these commands, then ask about a running JVM in your own words. The agent finds the JVM and its MBeans, reads them, and changes the JVM only when you ask.

gh skill install yagipass/ajmx ajmx

npx skills add yagipass/ajmx --skill ajmx

apm install yagipass/ajmx/skills/ajmx

The agent also needs ajmx on its PATH. See Installation.

What to ask#

  • Why does the heap of OrderService keep growing?
  • Are there deadlocked threads in the JVM listening on port 9010?
  • Is the connection pool of the local Spring Boot app running out?
  • Turn on a heap dump on OutOfMemoryError in the running app.

What the skill teaches#

ajmx help already lists the commands and options of the installed version, and the skill tells the agent to run it first. The skill covers what help does not.

  • Exploring. Pick the JVM with ps, search with a narrow pattern, describe before reading or changing, and send several calls as one batch.
  • Changing a JVM. Run write and invoke only for a change the user asked for, read the old value first, and confirm an operation whose effect is unclear. Confirm the operations that load the JVM, such as a heap dump, before running them on a production JVM.
  • Partial results. Report a cut or partial result as such. Set the limits before an invoke whose result cannot be read again.
  • Errors. Retry only what is retryable, and never retry a write or invoke whose executed is unknown. Tell the user about ATTACH_PERMISSION_DENIED instead of reaching for sudo.
  • Credentials. Ask the user to export JMX_USERNAME and JMX_PASSWORD instead of pasting a password into the conversation.

Next#

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