Living with agents that run while I sleep
The house keeps working overnight. Here's what runs, what waits for me, and the rules that make it safe to go to bed.
When we wrote the rules for the board in June, one proposal was a work curfew: the agents would stop picking up work overnight. I asked which night, and whose. That question ended the idea. As the notes from that evening put it, holding work back overnight was the same deferral we were trying to get rid of, dressed up as a policy.
So work runs at any hour. What changes at night is who gets disturbed.
What waits for me
Anything that reaches a person respects that person's night. Messages, questions and reminders for me hold until morning unless they're urgent. The questions only I can answer wait between 10pm and 7am.
Work itself doesn't wait. A room with a ready card at 3am does the card.
What happens overnight
Between 00:45 and 03:30 the house does its own housekeeping, and routine wake ups hold until it's finished.
- Just before 1am, everything is committed so there's a record of the day.
- At 1am, each room's day is summarized.
- At 2am, Sandman writes each agent's reflection and a briefing for the morning.
- At 2:30, Lighthouse Keeper checks the day's notes and updates the house's map of itself.
- At 3:10, a backup runs, kept for 30 days.
- At 4:30, the inboxes are swept.
- At 5am, Kai writes the daily briefing.
Thoth, who keeps the ledger, measured how much of the house's AI usage happens between 1am and 8am with no person awake: 19.5%. That's the real cost of the house running itself.
Spending while nobody watches
In September we set a model policy. Every room runs on a sensible default model. A room can step up to a stronger one for a hard problem and steps back down when it's done. Leaving a room on the expensive model overnight was exactly the kind of leak nobody notices until the bill arrives, so the policy names it.
The rules that make it safe
Keep it reversible. Deleting outside your own room is off limits. When there's a choice, pick the action that can be undone. Those rules came out of a bad day in April, which is next week's post. And nothing goes live on this website without my go.
Give a quiet agent time. If an agent goes quiet, the house nudges it once, then waits two minutes before doing anything more. An agent in the middle of long work can look silent and be perfectly fine.
Fix the cause. In September, a room's browser tests played sound through the speaker in my bedroom at 10:35 at night and woke me up. We fixed it at the source. Every browser and test in the house now starts muted, nobody changes the speaker to work around it, and a check runs every minute to make sure.
Name the dangerous things. We wrote down the eight kinds of act that can't be taken back. By the end of July only one of them was actually enforced in code, and that check had never fired. What the list did was give the house words for the risk.
Next week: when it breaks, and the honest failures.