One Day My Push Had an Extra Destination — Guarding Against /commit-push-pr Pushing to Remotes Beyond origin
The July 14 update made /commit-push-pr push to configured push remotes in addition to origin. Convenient, but if you keep a mirror or backup as a second remote, unintended pushes quietly multiply. Here is how to inventory which remotes you can push to, block anything off the allowlist with a pre-push hook, and keep unattended runs safe — with working code.
My MCP Timeout Was Being Ignored, and Every Call Died at Exactly 60 Seconds — Reclaiming Per-Server request_timeout_ms
A longer MCP tool call kept dying at exactly 60 seconds, ignoring the wait I had set. The cause: a per-server request_timeout_ms in .mcp.json that was never read, silently falling back to the default. Here is the correct placement after the fix, how to back the value out from a tool's response profile, and how to verify the cutoff yourself — with working code.
I Could Detect Failures — Then the Alerts Grew So Loud I Stopped Noticing
The moment I could detect silent job failures, my phone started buzzing too often to be useful. Here is how I collapsed alerts by action rather than event, added hysteresis and quiet hours, and built a three-step escalation so only the pages worth waking me survive.
When Claude Declines a Request on Safety Grounds, What Should an Unattended Pipeline Return?
A third kind of ending that is neither an error nor a normal completion — a safety decline. Here is how to fold it into a pipeline you run unattended, with a classifier and a review-queue design drawn from indie development.
Five Minutes of Silence, and Something Retries on Your Behalf — Rethinking Retry Ownership After the Streaming Idle Watchdog Became a Default
Claude Code's streaming idle watchdog is now on by default, quietly adding another retrying layer to your stack. This article inventories the four layers (SDK, wrapper, watchdog, scheduler), computes worst-case attempt amplification, and shows how to collapse retry ownership into a single layer.
Let the Downstream Task Verify the Upstream Actually Ran Today: A Completion Ledger and Dependency Barrier for Unattended Schedulers
Unattended schedulers have no notion of dependencies, so when a morning data-refresh task fails silently, the noon generation task keeps running on yesterday's leftovers. This is a design for recording upstream completion atomically and having downstream assert its preconditions before running, with working TypeScript and lessons from my own operations.
Trusting a Three-Day-Old Mirror: Stopping Unattended Tasks from Acting on a Stale Working Copy
A persistent clone reused for speed quietly drifts from the remote. Read 'has this article been fixed yet?' from an out-of-sync tree and your unattended task duplicates work or 'succeeds' against an old world. Here is a HEAD-match plus writability preflight, with a self-healing re-clone, in bash.
Failing Loud on Stale Inputs: A Freshness Contract for Unattended Pipelines
How to stop a scheduled, unattended pipeline from silently shipping degraded work when its upstream data is empty or stale. We implement a freshness contract in bash that asserts recency, non-emptiness, and provenance, plus two real pitfalls I hit running Cowork scheduled tasks.
Did That Post Actually Go Through? Safely Retrying an Interrupted MCP Write Without Double-Executing
When an MCP write tool call is interrupted by a dropped connection, you can't tell whether the server ran it. Here's why naive retries cause double-execution, and a working wrapper that uses idempotency keys and a reconcile read to retry safely — with examples from an unattended pipeline.
Every Tool Call Succeeds, Yet Nothing Moves Forward: Detecting Stagnation in Unattended Agents
No errors, yet the agent keeps replaying the same move while your budget quietly drains. Here is how to detect a success-but-no-progress loop using a progress oracle and action fingerprints, with a working Python implementation that halts safely.
Logged as success, but it produced nothing — stopping silent failures in Cowork scheduled tasks with end-of-run assertions
A Cowork scheduled task exits 0, yet not a single artifact was produced. Trusting the exit code alone hides this silent failure. Here is how to turn your definition of done into end-of-run assertions that fail loudly with an evidence log.
When Claude API Streaming Stops Without an Error: Detecting Silent Stalls and Resuming Mid-Stream
How to catch the 'silent stall' where Claude API streaming stops with no exception at all, using a content-level watchdog that times the gap between tokens, plus a resume path that carries received text forward as an assistant prefill, and a four-layer timeout budget for long-running automation.