Overnight Planning Noop Run Salvage

Overnight Planning No-Op Run Salvage

When to use

Use this when an unattended overnight planning or review wave appears to have run successfully but did not actually produce the expected artifacts.

Typical signals:

• Claude background process exits with code 0
• stdout/stderr logs are empty or missing
• expected docs/reports/...summary.md or scripts/review/results/... files do not exist
• no plan files or issue comments were materially updated

This showed up in the 2026-04-22 workspace-hub tier-1 knowledge beef-up wave across 6 separate unattended Claude launches.

Core lesson

exit_code == 0 is not sufficient proof that unattended Claude accomplished the task.

For planning-only overnight waves, the real success condition is artifact creation. If the required artifact is missing, treat the run as failed/no-op even if the process exited cleanly.

Recovery workflow

1. Treat the run as failed if required artifacts are absent

   • Do not report the lane as complete just because the process ended cleanly.
   • Check for the exact expected artifacts first.

2. Audit whether the core plan work already exists in the main repo

   • Search docs/plans/ for the target issue plans.
   • Search scripts/review/results/ for existing review artifacts.
   • Inspect docs/plans/README.md for missing index rows.
   • Query live GitHub issue state so your salvage summary reflects reality, not stale prompts.

3. Do only one hardened rerun, then stop

   • If the first unattended run no-op'd, one rerun is reasonable.
   • Harden the rerun so the first mandatory action is writing a unique summary/result file.
   • Use absolute prompt-file paths in the launcher.
   • If that rerun also exits 0 with no artifact, stop rerunning. Treat the unattended pattern itself as unreliable for that wave.

4. Salvage by generating the missing control-plane artifacts manually

   • If the plans already exist, do not recreate them blindly.
   • Create the missing terminal summary/report artifacts yourself under docs/reports/.
   • Summaries should capture:
     • what exists already
     • what was missing from the overnight run
     • current blockers
     • recommended morning execution order

5. Repair discovery/index surfaces if needed

   • If the overnight wave was supposed to create plan index rows, add the missing docs/plans/README.md rows.
   • Keep these updates grounded in actual on-disk artifacts and live issue state.

6. If a monitor expects artifacts in isolated worktrees, copy the salvaged summaries there

   • When a morning monitor job is pointed at specific worktrees, copy the generated summary artifacts into those worktree paths so the monitor sees the expected outputs.
   • This preserves operational continuity even though the original unattended workers no-op'd.

7. Document the no-op pattern explicitly

   • In your final report, say the unattended run exited 0 but produced no durable outputs.
   • Do not let future operators mistake the run for a success.
   • If you attempted a hardened rerun and it also no-op'd, say that explicitly too; this justifies switching to manual salvage instead of a third unattended retry.

Strong verification pattern

For each lane, verify these in order:

1. expected summary artifact exists
2. target plan files exist
3. review artifacts exist
4. GitHub issue state matches the summary narrative

If (1) is false but (2)/(3) are true, the lane likely needs salvage summaries, not fresh plan drafting.

What this pattern is best for

• planning-only overnight waves
• repo-governance / routing / documentation waves
• multi-worktree Claude batches where each lane is expected to emit one result artifact
• morning runbooks that depend on deterministic summary files

Pitfalls

• Do not trust empty or missing logs as the only signal; logs can be buffered or omitted.
• Do not rerun the same prompt indefinitely if multiple clean exits produce no artifacts.
• Do not overwrite existing good plans just because the overnight worker failed to summarize them.
• Do not leave the morning monitor pointed at nonexistent artifacts if you can salvage them manually.

Reusable rule

For unattended planning waves, artifact existence is the contract. No artifact = no success, regardless of process exit code.