dump-watcher

An AI agent that repairs ABAP short dumps, with a human on the Approve button.

A click in a Fiori app ends in a short dump. Within about a minute, your phone shows the cause, a unit test that reproduces the dump, and a proposed fix. Tap Approve and the watcher writes the fix, activates it and reruns the tests. Nothing changes in SAP without that tap.

This is a proof of concept for lab and trial systems only. It writes ABAP code after approval. Never point it at a system you care about.

How it works

1. Noticing a dump without polling. The watcher runs tail -F over SSH on the work process traces (dev_w*). When the kernel logs RABAX: level LEV_RX_ERROR_SAVE completed, the watcher reads SAP's ADT dump feed every 2 s for up to a minute. A check every 5 minutes and a 24-hour catch-up at startup are the safety net.
2. The agent. For each new dump of the demo user, the watcher starts Claude Code in headless mode, with agent/dump-repair.md as its playbook. The agent reads the code and its history, writes a unit test that reproduces the dump, drafts a fix and syntax-checks it. It never writes the fix itself.
3. The checks. The watcher, not the agent, verifies the proposal: the object is in the lab package, the fix is bound to the SHA-256 hash of the source the agent read, there's no catch-all handler or removed RAISE SHORTDUMP, and the test contract holds (the new test fails with the same runtime error, existing tests pass).
4. The phone. The watcher pushes a summary to a private ntfy topic. The link opens a proposal page that listens only on the Mac's Tailscale address. Approve and Reject carry a one-time token that expires after an hour.
5. Apply and verify. After Approve, the watcher writes the fix, activates it and reruns the tests. If they fail, it restores the old source and verifies the restore. A CDS fix has no unit test, so it waits for a human re-click in the app instead.

When the cause is data rather than code, the agent says so, and the phone shows the missing entry with no Approve button.

Guardrails

• One door to SAP: the agent reaches SAP only through vsp, started with writes limited to $ZDUMP_LAB, free SQL blocked, and deletes and transport changes disabled (.mcp.json).
• A short allow-list: 12 tools (agent/settings.json); every other tool is denied (--permission-mode dontAsk).
• A guard on every write: a PreToolUse hook (agent/lab-guard.mjs) lets the agent write only the test-class include of a lab class and activate lab classes.
• Hash binding, test contract and verified restore: in core.mjs, covered by npm test.

Requirements

• SAP ABAP Cloud Developer Trial (A4H) in Docker. The container name a4h25 and the trace path are set in watcher.mjs (TRACE_ARGS).
• vsp on the Docker host, configured with your SAP connection in /root/.env.
• An SSH alias vps in ~/.ssh/config for the Docker host, with key login and rights to run docker exec and vsp.
• Node.js 22 or later, and Claude Code signed in on the machine that runs the watcher.
• The ntfy app on your phone, and Tailscale on both the phone and the machine that runs the watcher. Developed on macOS.

Setup

1. npm install
2. cp .env.example .env, then set NTFY_TOPIC to a random name (echo "dump-watcher-$(openssl rand -hex 6)") and subscribe to it in the ntfy app. The topic name is the only secret.
3. In SAP, create the local package $ZDUMP_LAB with the objects in lab/: the tables from lab/tables.json, the CDS views, behavior definitions, classes and the service definition. Add an OData V4 UI service binding ZSB_DL_ORDER_O4 and publish it. Run ZDL_SEED once.
4. Create a user DEMO in SU01 as a copy of DEVELOPER. The watcher ignores dumps of other users.
5. node watcher.mjs reset puts the lab back to its broken baseline.

Run

node watcher.mjs

Then open the binding's Fiori Elements preview in a private window as DEMO (log off any other session first). Opening the app triggers the value-help case, Recalculate on order 1 the code bug, and Recalculate on order 3 the data case.

Other commands: node watcher.mjs analyze <dump-id> runs the agent on one dump without a notification; node watcher.mjs reset restores the lab; npm test runs the test suite.

More detail: the design spec in docs/superpowers/specs/ and the rehearsal log.

Credits

vibing-steampunk (vsp) by Alice Vinogradova provides the MCP server for ABAP Development Tools.

License

MIT