TL;DR
I spent a month babysitting Claude Code runs — watching every prompt, every tool call, every "are you sure?" If I stepped away for an hour, things either silently stalled or did something I didn't want. Here are 5 patterns that finally got me to a place where my agent runs unattended for a full day and I'm not nervous about it. The big one is treating the agent like a flaky background job, not a chat partner.
The Problem
When I first started using Claude Code (this was on claude-sonnet-4-6, then claude-opus-4-7), I treated it like an ultra-fast pair programmer. I'd kick off a task, watch it tear through files, and step in whenever it got weird. That's fine for 20-minute sessions.
It falls apart fast when you want the agent to run for hours.
