I Watched an Agent Try to Fix a File It Had Already Fixed — Stale Shallow Clones and Refreshing Before You Decide
An unattended agent tried to re-fix a file it had already fixed. The cause was a days-old shallow clone it kept reading. Here is how to detect that staleness numerically and re-clone only before decisions.
Stopping an Unattended Writer From Publishing the Same Article Twice
When a Cowork scheduled task generates articles every day, the real danger isn't a crash — it's quietly publishing a piece that overlaps with one from a few days ago. Here is a gate that compares slug similarity and the day's log before publishing, built from a near-miss I caught this morning.
Surviving the 90-Second Code Execution Cell Limit with Checkpointed Chunking
Claude's code execution tool now enforces a 90-second per-cell limit. Here is how to keep a long batch from getting cut off there: persist progress to the container filesystem and resume across cells, with working code for timing, idempotent checkpoints, and knowing when to offload.
Why Cowork's bash Says 'No Such File' When Finder Shows It Right There
Connect a cloud-synced folder to Cowork and bash sees empty placeholders while cat fails. Here is how on-demand materialization actually works, and the design patterns that keep your automations from silently dropping data.
Noticing From the Outside When a Scheduled Job Quietly Did Nothing
exit 0, but zero output. How to catch a silent no-op not from the job's own log but from an external heartbeat ledger and ground truth, written from running several sites on a nightly schedule as an indie developer.
An Article My Gate Rejected Got Published — The Cost of Chaining the Quality Gate and git push in One Call
In an unattended publishing pipeline, an article my quality gate had rejected went live anyway. The cause was chaining the gate and git push into a single shell call. Here is how the exit code gets swallowed, and a two-phase publish-marker design that refuses to push until every gate has demonstrably passed.
Claude Code Adds /cd — Carrying Your Warm Cache Across Repositories
Claude Code's new /cd moves a running session to another working directory without rebuilding the prompt cache. Here are the design calls and pitfalls when you sweep across several repositories in one sitting.
Moving Cleanup and Logging into a SessionEnd Hook
How to use Claude Code's new post-session hook to automate temp-file cleanup and log writing after a session ends, with real examples from a pipeline that processes several repositories in sequence.
Give an Unattended Agent Only the MCP Tools It Needs — Enforcing a Deny-by-Default Policy
An unattended Claude Code agent can't lean on a permission prompt, so whatever a tool can reach becomes the blast radius. Here's how to lock MCP servers and tools down to deny-by-default and hand back only what the job needs, with managed-settings.json examples.
The Day a Billing Change Got Reversed at the Last Minute — Designing a Reversible Pipeline So You Don't Rewrite in a Panic
A billing change due to take effect on June 15 was retracted at the eleventh hour. From the position of someone who had literally logged 'effective today' the night before, here is why I didn't have to scramble to rewrite my headless stages, and how to build a pipeline that survives reversals and delays — with working code.
When an Announced Billing Change Gets Paused at the Last Minute: Designing Automation That Doesn't Rush the Cutover
A billing change that was supposed to take effect on June 15 was paused that same day. If your pipeline trusts the announced date, a retraction breaks it twice. Here is a design that decides the cutover from a runtime signal, with implementation code.
When an Announced Billing Change Is Withdrawn at the Last Minute, Change No Code
A billing change that was supposed to take effect was withdrawn on the day. To survive announce, apply, and revert without touching code, I keep platform behavior behind a single flag and project the monthly delta from real logs.