Developer builds dead-man's switch to catch silent failures in AI trading bots
A developer discovered their AI trading bot had silently stopped running for three days without triggering any errors or alerts. The core problem was that conventional error-handling tools like try/except blocks and loggers only work if the code actually runs in the first place. To fix this blind spot, the developer implemented a dead-man's switch — a pattern where the job actively pings an external server on success, and silence triggers the alarm. Unlike standard monitoring, the watchdog runs on a separate system so it remains active even if the main machine fails. The approach inverts traditional failure detection: instead of waiting for bad news, it expects regular good news and treats its absence as the alert.
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