Lily
Posted on Jul 13
• Originally published at dev.to
In my previous autopilot article, I walked through a setup that runs Claude unattended via launchd. This time I want to talk about what happens behind the curtain — the problem where an unattended job quietly dies and nobody ever notices — and how to deal with it.
The truly scary part of unattended automation isn't bugs; it's silent failure. A launchd job can crash with exit 78, a hooks script can lose its execute permission, or agentmemory can run in a "half-alive" state with the port open but no worker behind it — and on the surface, nothing looks wrong. There's a real case documented in the comments of automation-health.sh where exactly this state persisted for six days with nobody noticing.
