Overview
Most performance tools tell you what's happening — top, Activity Monitor, htop. system-eye goes a step further: it lets you define what should happen and enforces it.
The vision: write a policy like "Xcode gets at most 4 cores and 8GB RAM during a build" or "this background process gets throttled when battery is below 30%" and have the system enforce it automatically, without you babysitting Activity Monitor.
Architecture
A Rust workspace with clean separation of concerns:
systemeye-core — shared types, pressure classification
systemeye-collector — system telemetry (CPU, memory, I/O per process)
systemeye-daemon — background enforcement loop
systemeye-cli — status, top, why <app>
systemeye-mcp — localhost HTTP API
The daemon runs continuously, collects telemetry via systemeye-collector, evaluates active policies, and applies enforcement actions (priority adjustment, resource limits via macOS resource controls).
CLI
systemeye-cli status # current system pressure + active policies
systemeye-cli top --limit 5 # top 5 processes by resource consumption
systemeye-cli why "Xcode" # why is Xcode being throttled right now
Current status & roadmap
The collector and CLI are working. The daemon loop and policy evaluation engine are in active development.
Next: policy DSL — a simple declarative format for expressing resource constraints:
[[policy]]
app = "Xcode"
max_cpu_cores = 4
max_memory_gb = 8
apply_when = "battery < 50%"
Further out: MCP integration to expose system state and policy management via a local API, enabling AI assistants to reason about and adjust system resource allocation.
This is a tool I want to exist. Building it.