Every night a scheduled job wakes up, reads a queue of pending work across my projects, and spawns one headless agent session per target to drain it. In the morning I read a report over coffee. That's the pitch, and scheduling it is genuinely the easy part, any cron line can do that. What took actual design is the policy around it, because an unattended agent with write access is a very fast way to wake up to a mess. Five laws came out of that design.
1. The runner owns the envelope, the child owns the work
A headless session cannot mind its manners, it won't maintain a lock, it won't notice a sibling, it dies without cleaning up. So the runner does all of that on its behalf. It takes the claim on the target before spawning the child, refreshes the heartbeat on a timer while the child runs, and releases it always, crash included. Manners stop being the child's job, which means they stop being a hope.
runner: take the claim on the target
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