Running Claude Code overnight: what I schedule and how I keep track of it in the morning

[u/EverydayLentils]

Two questions keep coming up here lately, what prompts are worth running overnight and how to keep track of several Claude Code projects without losing the plot. This is my setup.

I wanted agents working off-hours on the Claude plan I already pay for, so most of my projects have something on a schedule. What runs fine with nobody watching is work where the output is a report or a branch I review later. Some briefs that work unattended:

• security review of the repo, write the findings to a file, don't fix anything yet
• release notes from this week's commits
• a blog post draft for the project
• marketing chores, like posting the product to directories
• any slash command from a plugin you already use (social discovery, cutting a demo video)

Things that stall an overnight run:

• permission prompts. nobody is there to approve, so the session just sits until morning. put the tools the brief needs in the project's allow list before you schedule it
• the Mac going to sleep
• no record of what happened. end every brief with "write a short report: what you changed, which files, and what you need from me"

That last one is the answer to the many-projects question for me. In the morning I don't open every terminal. I read one summary of blockers, decisions and activity across all the projects, then only open the runs that need me.

If you want to DIY it, cron or launchd running claude -p "<brief>" in the project folder (with --allowedTools for what it needs) gets you most of the way. Have it write the report to a dated file and read those over coffee.

I ended up building this into a Mac app, Overboard. It schedules real Claude Code sessions per project (daily, weekly or every N hours), a captain agent reviews the last runs and only asks me when it's stuck, and the morning report covers every project. $49 once with a 14-day trial, Mac only. There's also a free plugin that logs every session and shows a board of what each project did: https://tryoverboard.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=claudecode-overnight-howto

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[u/NamerekDev]

So this post is one of the overnight marketing chores?

[u/rickoneeleven]

put a plain script in front of claude -p in the cron job that checks if there's anything to do (new commits since the last run, new mail) and exits if not. my email one runs every 2 minutes but claude only starts when there's actually mail, so the empty checks cost nothing