Proactive Health: when something quietly stops working

You shouldn't have to remember to check whether Dex is still doing its job.

Meeting notes can stop arriving. Search can fall behind. A planning file can lose the protection you thought it had. New contacts can stop appearing. Sometimes the machinery behind this still looks as though it is running, so the problem stays hidden until you need something that should have been there.

Proactive Health means you do not have to discover those problems by accident. When you start Dex, it may show a simple status. If everything is fine, Dex stays out of your way. If something newly serious needs attention, Dex tells you clearly and points you towards a safe investigation.

For the wider maintenance story — updates, repairs, and common problems — see Updating, health, and troubleshooting.

Running doesn't always mean working

A background task can be installed, start on time, and still fail before it produces anything useful. That is why Dex does not treat “it ran” as proof that “it worked.”

Dex waits for a check it can trust. A green-looking schedule on its own is never enough for an all-clear.

The planning-file example is about the protection around the file, not whether it opens. Proactive Health does not promise to validate every file one by one.

What Dex shows you

Proactive Health is designed to be calm rather than noisy:

• All good. Dex shows a short status and when it was last confirmed.
• Still getting ready. On first use, Dex is preparing its health status. It stays quiet until it has something reliable to say.
• Only a newly serious problem interrupts. It gets a clear message and a route to /dex-doctor.
• The same problem is continuing. It remains visible, but Dex does not interrupt you with the same alert every time you start a conversation.
• Back to normal. Recovery appears as a brief confirmation, not another alarm.

Less urgent or older information stays in the normal status instead of becoming an interruption. There is nothing new to configure and no notification settings to manage.

Here is the calm line beside the one-time interruption. The timestamps are illustrative; the wording is the exact session-start output:

A half-finished check can never become an all-clear

Sometimes a health check is interrupted, loses access, or finishes only part of its work. When that happens, Dex keeps the latest result it fully confirmed, together with when it was confirmed.

It does not replace a trustworthy status with a guess. Once Dex has finished checking everything it expects to check, it can update the result; an incomplete attempt cannot quietly erase what Dex knew before.

When something needs attention

Proactive Health notices the problem. Doctor investigates it.

Run /dex-doctor, or simply ask Dex to check what is wrong. Doctor looks at the underlying setup, explains what has stopped working and what that means for your work, then gives you the appropriate next step.

The health status itself does not repair files or change connected accounts. Doctor can apply safe, reversible fixes and will ask before anything meaningful. If the handoff is no longer safe, Dex falls back to /dex-doctor instead of guessing.

Private and safe by default

Your health status is built from information Dex already keeps with your local setup. Proactive Health is local and private: it does not add a browser dashboard or another account. The health status is read-only; it does not silently change your files or external services.

This separation is deliberate: Proactive Health tells you when something deserves attention; Doctor helps you understand and fix it safely.

Ask Dex to check itself

You do not need to remember any of the machinery behind this page. Use the prompt below whenever you want the plain-English version for your own setup.

First, fetch and read the page I'm referring to: https://heydex.ai/help/proactive-health.md

Check whether Dex is working properly on this computer. Tell me, in plain
English:

- what is working
- what needs attention and how it affects my work
- what you can safely fix, and what needs my approval

Do not assume that something worked just because it was scheduled or
started. If a check is incomplete, keep the latest fully confirmed result
instead of calling it healthy. If something newly serious needs attention,
take me to `/dex-doctor`; keep warnings, older results, recovery, and first-use
preparing calm. Do not change anything important without asking me first.

For more on jobs that run in the background, see Automations that actually run. For updates and the full Doctor workflow, see Updating, health, and troubleshooting.