The station works while you’re away — inside a leash you set, with a receipt for every decision.
You go to bed. The station picks a small, grounded job toward your goals, does it, and leaves a draft on your desk.
You’ve been away 30 minutes (no clicks, no keys). The station counts you as gone.
About every 45 minutes it considers one job. It checks six gates first. Most nights, most beats are skipped.
A job that passes runs for real — inside your REACH setting, under your budget caps.
You come back to a morning report: what fired, what was skipped and why, drafts to review.
Out of the box the station does nothing unattended. INITIATIVE starts at WAIT. Everything below is you choosing to turn a dial.
Open SETTINGS › AUTONOMY. Three rows:
| INITIATIVE — does it start work on its own? | |
|---|---|
| WAIT | nothing runs unless you ask (default) |
| SUGGEST | lines up suggestions you approve — never acts on its own |
| BUILD | does a few small grounded jobs a day on its own |
| FREE | picks & does work toward your goals while you’re away |
| REACH — how far an unattended action may go | |
|---|---|
| OBSERVE | read / research only — writes nothing |
| SANDBOX | build & write locally — nothing leaves the machine (default) |
| SEND & PUBLISH | the highest rung: unattended actions may leave the machine — send, publish, or contact external services |
| PACE — how many unattended jobs per day | |
|---|---|
| LIGHT 1 · STANDARD 3 (default) · BUSY 6 · MAX 12 | the daily limit, counted per calendar day |
STEER it at a project folder, a thread, or a goal, and every overnight beat starts there. CLEAR hands the choice back to the station.
RULE OUT anything it should never touch unattended. The station respects the list before it picks a job.
SETTINGS › BUDGET holds hard USD caps — PER RUN, PER AGENT, PER DAY, GLOBAL — enforced against the real ledger. Night Shift can’t spend past them.
Before any beat fires, the station checks, in order: posture (is INITIATIVE above WAIT?), away (have you really been gone 30 minutes?), leash (any jobs left today?), cooldown (45 minutes since the last?), halt (does an older saved automation pause remain?), concurrency (is something already running?). The first gate that says no ends the beat — and that reason is what you read in the morning.
The first time you’re back after a genuine absence, COMMS prints one report. Every line maps to a real record:
If nothing fired, it says so plainly and says why. It never pads a quiet night.
SETTINGS › NIGHT SHIFT shows the live state — STATE, MODE, DAILY LIMIT, LAST JOB, NEXT JOB EARLIEST — plus RECENT DECISIONS: an append-only trail of every fire, skip, and defer, with the gate that decided it. It is written to disk as it happens and can’t be edited after the fact. ▤ LAST REPORT re-opens the morning report any time.
Only if you set REACH to SEND & PUBLISH and have granted the tool. On OBSERVE or SANDBOX (the default) nothing leaves the machine.
No clock. “Away” means no input for 30 minutes, day or night. If you want it to work only while you sleep, leave INITIATIVE at WAIT during the day.
One beat that fired. Skipped beats don’t count. The counter resets each calendar day.
On your desk in COMMS, listed in the morning report, and under DRAFTS in the NIGHT SHIFT panel until you review them. A gentle nudge reminds you if they sit unreviewed.