I built SuperTerminal because I kept doing the same thing every incident. SSH in, pull logs, grep for errors, SSH into another server, cross-reference timestamps, repeat until I found the cause. The fix was usually five minutes. Getting there took 45.
If you’re reading this, you probably know the loop. Your real competition for a tool like SuperTerminal isn’t PagerDuty or Rundeck. It’s the workflow you already have: SSH in, pull logs, read them yourself, hope you spot the pattern.
The loop
Every on-call engineer knows it:
- Alert fires. Phone buzzes.
- Open laptop. SSH into the server that’s alerting.
tail -f /var/log/something. Scroll. Grep for errors.- See an error. SSH into the upstream service to check if that’s the source.
- Pull more logs. Cross-reference timestamps.
- Check if someone deployed recently. Look at the deploy log. Compare timestamps.
- Maybe check resource usage. Memory leak? Disk full? Connection pool exhausted?
- Eventually find the root cause. Apply a fix. Verify. Go back to sleep.
Steps 3 through 7 take 30-45 minutes on a good night. On a bad night with multiple services involved, over an hour. The actual fix in step 8 usually takes 5 minutes.
Why you stay here
Manual SSH investigation has one advantage no tool can match: it always works. You don’t need a vendor’s platform to be up. You don’t need a working integration. You don’t need to remember how some tool works at 2am when your brain is at 40%. SSH is muscle memory.
The other reason is less rational: it feels like enough. “We have runbooks in Notion” feels like a plan, even when those runbooks are six months out of date and don’t actually execute anything.
And there’s the trust problem. If you’re going to let a tool investigate your production servers, you need to trust it. Will it send logs somewhere you didn’t approve? Will it give you a confidently wrong answer that wastes more time than it saves?
I thought about all of this when building SuperTerminal.
What I built differently
SuperTerminal doesn’t replace SSH. It uses your existing SSH config to connect to your servers. Same credentials, same access. The difference is what happens between commands.
In the manual workflow, you run a command, read the output, decide what to check next, run another command. That decision loop is where the time goes. I wanted the AI to handle that part.
With SuperTerminal, you describe the incident (“payments service returning 500s since midnight”), and it SSHes into the server, runs diagnostic commands, and the AI reads the output before deciding what to check next. Not a summary of the logs. An interpretation: “The connection pool to the database is exhausted. Connections peaked at 23:47, which matches the start of 500 errors. The pool limit is set to 20 in the config and there are currently 20 active connections with 47 waiting.”
You still decide what to do with that information. The AI doesn’t execute fixes without your approval.
How they compare
| Aspect | Manual SSH | SuperTerminal |
|---|---|---|
| Time to root cause | 30-45 minutes | Minutes |
| Setup required | None (you already have SSH) | 5 minutes (uses existing SSH config) |
| Works offline | Yes | Yes (desktop app, AI calls go direct to provider) |
| Logs leave your machine | No | No |
| Runbook reuse | Copy-paste from Notion/Confluence | Built-in, executable, AI-interpreted |
| Output interpretation | You read the logs | AI reads the logs and tells you what it means |
| Learning curve at 2am | Zero (muscle memory) | Low (describe the problem in English) |
| Cost | Free (your time isn’t free, but the tool is) | Free while in beta |
| Works without internet | Yes | Needs internet for AI API calls |
| Scales with team | Knowledge stays in one person’s head | Runbooks are shareable and reusable |
When to stick with manual SSH
If the server is air-gapped, you don’t have a choice. If you already know what’s wrong and just need to verify, SSH is faster. If you need to attach a debugger or step through code, no automation tool helps with that. And if you fundamentally don’t trust AI interpretation, reading raw logs yourself is the honest answer.
SuperTerminal doesn’t replace your terminal. It replaces the 30 minutes of log hunting that comes before most fixes.
When SuperTerminal is worth trying
The clearest signal is repetition. If you’re running the same diagnostic checklist every incident, SSHing between multiple services to correlate timestamps, or you’re the only ops person and you need to move faster, that’s the problem I built this for. Build the runbook once, reuse it every time the same failure mode fires.
Try it
SuperTerminal is free while in beta. It uses your SSH config and your own AI API keys. Set it up in 5 minutes.