I built picomon because nvtop kept crashing on my AMD rigs with assertion errors. Earlier this month, I whipped up a Python script with an LLM that parsed amd-smi output. It was ugly. It worked. I called it picomon.
Era 1: The Crash
I was training a 7B model on AMD MI200s. nvtop worked fine on NVIDIA. On AMD? Random crashes, assertion failures, zero visibility into memory usage. I needed something that just worked.
Era 2: The Glow-Up
Then I discovered Textual. If you haven’t used it, Textual is what happens when a Python developer gets bored of building web apps and decides terminal UIs should be beautiful. I rewrote picomon from scratch.
What 0.2.0 Actually Does
- Multi-vendor support: AMD (ROCm), NVIDIA (nvidia-smi), Apple Silicon in one tool
- Textual…
I built picomon because nvtop kept crashing on my AMD rigs with assertion errors. Earlier this month, I whipped up a Python script with an LLM that parsed amd-smi output. It was ugly. It worked. I called it picomon.
Era 1: The Crash
I was training a 7B model on AMD MI200s. nvtop worked fine on NVIDIA. On AMD? Random crashes, assertion failures, zero visibility into memory usage. I needed something that just worked.
Era 2: The Glow-Up
Then I discovered Textual. If you haven’t used it, Textual is what happens when a Python developer gets bored of building web apps and decides terminal UIs should be beautiful. I rewrote picomon from scratch.
What 0.2.0 Actually Does
- Multi-vendor support: AMD (ROCm), NVIDIA (nvidia-smi), Apple Silicon in one tool
- Textual TUI: Live-updating dashboard with memory, utilization, temperature, power draw
- Rig cards: Navigate to a shareable summary of your setup. Mine shows:
╭────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ P I C O M O N │
│────────────────────────────────────────────│
│ MacBook-Pro.local │
│ arm | 128 GB RAM │
│────────────────────────────────────────────│
│ 1 × Apple M3 Max GPU │
│ 128 GB VRAM | 50 W TDP │
│────────────────────────────────────────────│
│ GFX ████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░ 50% │
│ PWR ██░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 6W │
│ VRAM ██████████████████░░░░░░ 97GB │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────╯
- Lightweight: No GUI dependencies, installs with pip, runs in a tmux session
The Rig Card Flex
The rig card feature is pure ego. I have a group chat with other ML engineers. We share benchmarks, model configs, and now—server specs. Navigate to it with a quick shortcut, copy the ASCII art, paste it anywhere.
The Technical Bits
The original script used amd-smi –json and parsed the output. The Textual version uses Python’s asyncio to poll metrics every 3 seconds and renders with Rich’s layout engine. The Apple Silicon support was added because I wanted the same tool I use on servers to work on my Mac.
Why This Matters
Most GPU monitoring tools are vendor-locked or bloated. picomon is what you run in a tmux session on a headless server and forget about. The 0.2.0 release just makes it pretty.
Install it: pip install picomon
Source: github.com/omarkamali/picomon
Now back to training models.
***
Timer’s up. Publish it.