07-overnight.md

Run work while you sleep

This is the payoff for everything before it. An agent you can trust to verify its own work is an agent you can leave alone with a hard task. What makes that safe isn't hope. It's a checkable finish condition, an isolated worktree, and a decision log you audit in the morning.

The overnight contract

A good handoff has the goal, the finish condition, permissions, and an escape hatch. It doesn't need to be long:

/poteto-mode im going to bed. migrate every caller to the new parser in a fresh worktree off <base>.
done means zero old callers, all parser fixtures pass, old api deleted.
keep a decision log. don't ask me before committing.
/loop until done. if you're truly stuck after a few hours, stop and write up why.

Walk through what each line buys you:

• "im going to bed" is a session override. The agent stops asking and keeps going.
• "done means..." turns the goal into checks every iteration can run.
• "fresh worktree off <base>" keeps the run from colliding with anything else you have open.
• "don't ask me before committing" pre-answers the permission the agent would otherwise block on.
• /loop is Cursor's built-in wake mechanism, not a pstack skill. The Autonomous run playbook uses it to re-check the finish condition on events or a heartbeat.
• The escape hatch lets it stop at a genuine dead end and write up why, which beats eight hours of creative goal reinterpretation.

Because you'll review this work after stepping away, /poteto-mode routes it through /figure-it-out, which designs the run's phases before any code and wires in the decision log.

What the loop does all night

flowchart TD
    A[Check the finish condition] --> B[Make the smallest justified change]
    B --> C[Verify against the real artifact]
    C --> D{Progress?}
    D -->|Yes| E[Commit]
    D -->|No| F[Discard]
    E --> G[Log one decision row]
    F --> G
    G --> A

Loading

One change, one check, one log row, every iteration. Changes that didn't help get discarded, not left to ride. A plateau means pivot, not stop, and the finish condition never quietly relaxes to declare victory.

The morning audit

/show-me-your-work is what makes the run reviewable. Each row records the time, phase, decision, reason, an evidence pointer, and the result, in a TSV at decisions.tsv (or .audit/<task-slug>.tsv when several runs share a directory). It stays local by default. Commit it when the work is ambitious enough that a reviewer needs the trail to trust the result.

When you're back, ask for the run in review form:

/show-me-your-work catch me up on what you did last night

Before the skill hands back its summary, it spawns a reviewer on a different model family to read the trail and the transcript, and the reply ends with an Attention section listing what deserves your scrutiny. Read that section first, then the log rows it points at. You're auditing decisions, not re-reading the whole night.

When the night holds a queue, not a task

The contract above drives one task to one finish condition. Some nights hold more, a queue of independent changes or a whole program. Three playbooks scale the same trust up.

Autopilot-full runs a queue of independent PRs to merged. Each PR gets one owner agent that carries it from build through merge, and no owner merges on its own verdict. A swarm of fresh verifiers checks every merge-ready head, and only a clean verdict authorizes the merge:

/poteto-mode full autopilot on this queue. each item is independent. i want them merged by morning.

Autopilot-stack runs the same owner loop but ships nothing. You wake up to one linear Graphite stack with a verifier's verdict on every link, and you review and land it yourself. Pick it over Autopilot-full when the changes are coupled, or when you want your own eyes on the work before anything merges:

/poteto-mode autopilot these five changes but stack them, don't ship. i'll land the stack in the morning.

Orchestrate is for a program that outlives any single agent: multi-day, many stacked PRs, fleets of subagents under one standing coordinator chat. The coordinator authors briefs, collects what its subagents finish, keeps the lowest unmerged PR green, and never writes code itself. It's deliberately heavy machinery. If one agent could finish the work in a session, the playbook itself routes you back to the overnight contract above:

/poteto-mode orchestrate the store migration. own it until every package is converted and merged. i'll check in twice a day.

Pitfall: a duration is not a finish condition. "work on this for 4 hours" gives the agent nothing to check, and you'll wake up to four hours of motion instead of a result. Give /loop a predicate that can pass or fail.

Next: Steer with principle names.