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.
Stop Leaving a Static API Key in Your Unattended Jobs — Move to Short-Lived WIF Credentials
Claude Code is moving from static API keys toward short-lived, scoped credentials via WIF (Workload Identity Federation). Here is how to translate that idea to a small unattended pipeline so a leaked key has a much smaller blast radius — with working code and the failure modes to watch.
Will It Stay Light When You Run It Unattended? Observing and Capping Claude Code's Long-Session Memory
How to keep long, unattended Claude Code sessions from slowly getting heavier — with a tiny ps-based RSS sampler, a rolling-baseline watchdog, and session segmentation, shown with working scripts and a before/after comparison.
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.
Stop the Bill Before It Balloons: Designing API Key Blast Radius for Unattended Pipelines
Designing for leaks instead of pretending they won't happen: workspace-scoped keys, zero-downtime rotation, and a usage watchdog that flags spikes with a rolling baseline and median absolute deviation — wired into a scheduled run.
When the Same Model Name Starts Behaving Differently: A Startup Canary for Unattended Pipelines
An in-place Opus upgrade can change your output, and an unattended publishing pipeline will never notice. Here is a lightweight startup canary that fingerprints behavior, catches drift, and halts the batch — with measured cost and latency.
Higher Rate Limits Don't Mean Tighter Schedules — Spend the Headroom on 429 Recovery
When Claude Code's rate limits went up, the instinct was to pack the schedule tighter. Here's why I did the opposite and routed the new headroom into retry budget instead — a pacing note for unattended pipelines.
Your Sandbox Can Run the Code but Shouldn't Read Your Credentials — Shrinking the Secret-Read Surface with sandbox.credentials
Claude Code's sandbox can still read ~/.aws/credentials and token env vars by default. Using sandbox.credentials (v2.1.187+), here is how I tightened the secret-read surface of unattended runs at the OS level, with config and verification you can reuse.
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.