Writer’s Brief (Outline)

This section is a handoff for a writer - what the post is about and what to cover.

The Hook

What if your AI assistant kept working after you closed the laptop?

Main Points to Cover

  1. The pattern: launchd (macOS scheduler) + claude -p (headless Claude) = agents that run on autopilot
  2. The first implementation: Air Traffic Control - an inbox router that sorts your brain dumps into the right files, twice a day, without you touching anything
  3. The bigger idea: “capture is cheap, sorting is free” - you just throw stuff into a pile and the system handles the rest

The Angle

Personal discovery. Built a bunch of Claude Code skills that require manual invocation, then realized the boring ones could just… run themselves. The moment it clicked was seeing the Chief of Staff inbox get a routing summary from an agent that ran while I was making coffee.

Target Reader

People using Claude Code (or any AI coding assistant) who have built workflows but still manually trigger everything. Anyone interested in personal automation that isn’t just cron jobs running Python scripts.

Tone Notes

Casual, slightly amazed it works. The funny part is how simple it is - it’s basically a shell script, a prompt, and a macOS scheduler. No fancy infrastructure. The gap between “I have an AI agent” and “I have an AI agent that runs while I sleep” turned out to be like 20 minutes of work.

Raw Material / Moments to Write From

  • Air Traffic Control works great. Except you have to remember to use it.
  • “Can this just run by itself?” Turns out the answer is embarrassingly simple.
  • Shell script + claude -p (headless mode) + launchd plist. 9am and 6pm. Skips if inbox is empty.
  • Tested with two items. Watched the log. Items appeared in the right places. Routing summary showed up. Didn’t do anything.
  • “Tomorrow morning at 9am it’ll happen again whether I’m at my desk or not.”
  • 20 minutes of setup. No database, no server, no deployment. Just files and a schedule.
  • Core philosophy: “capture is cheap, sorting is free.”
  • The gap between “I have an AI agent” and “I have an AI agent that runs while I sleep” was 20 minutes.