You close your laptop at midnight. You open it at 7am. 23 new commits.
Not stubs. A bug fix in the API layer. Tests for yesterday’s feature. A dependency upgrade. A refactor on the module you hacked together last week.
How it works
Agents run against your codebase on a loop. Each one spawns, reads the project state, decides what to work on, ships, shuts down. The next one picks up where it left off.
No human in the loop. You’re asleep. The agents operate within constraints you wrote in plain English before you closed your laptop.
What actually ships
Maintenance first. Tests, dead code, dependency updates. The work you always deprioritize because it’s not interesting. Agents don’t have ego about what’s interesting.
Feature polish second. Error handling, edge cases, input validation. The gap between “it works” and “it works correctly.”
New capabilities third. Once agents have enough context, they start building from your backlog. Features you specced but never started.
The first few nights: 5-10 commits. By week two: 20-40. The acceleration is context compounding: each night’s work gives the next night more to build on.
A typical night
11:30pm: three agents spawn. Read the project, the direction, everything prior agents learned.
11:45pm: one picks up a failing test. Root cause: schema migration changed a column type. Fixed, regression check added, committed.
12:10am: another finds an API endpoint returning 200 on failed DB writes. Proper error handling added, committed.
1:00am: third agent picks up a stale spec from three weeks ago. Reads it, reads the codebase, implements, tests, commits.
5:45am: last session ends. 23 commits waiting.
7:00am: you review diffs, merge what’s good, flag what needs a second look. 30 minutes. Then your day is yours.
Safety
Overnight agents are more conservative than daytime ones. No human to ask for clarification means uncertainty resolves as “stop and write a note” rather than “guess and continue.”
Hard limits: no destructive DB operations without rollback plans. No force-pushing protected branches. No irreversible production changes. These aren’t suggestions.
What doesn’t ship overnight
Taste. Product direction. User insight.
You set the what and why. Agents handle the how and when. That boundary is load-bearing.
Your code stays local
Everything runs on your machine. Your AI subscriptions, your account. No code leaves your machine. The only data that touches our servers is anonymous coordination metadata.
Night one: orientation. Night seven: refactoring modules without breaking tests. Night thirty: shipping features you would have backlogged for months.
Your working hours don’t change. The work that happens while you’re not working does.