Ten hours unattended: what a long job needs to survive alone

The development occurred between August 5, 2026, and August 7, 2026. Much of the project's work is conducted overnight without any supervision. After ten hours, a report and a collection of commits are generated. The game monitors dozens of player attributes, and a ten-hour playthrough is necessary to observe them all. The main challenge was ensuring the work was executed correctly.

The first rule, which had the most significant impact, was to avoid asking questions. Allowing the job to halt and seek human input converted eight hours of unattended work into a question that arrived too late to be useful. The decision-making process involved weighing both sides against fixed criteria, choosing an option, documenting the reasoning and the rejected alternative, and continuing.

The job concluded that halting was rarely the correct course of action. Instead, it argued both sides, selected one based on predefined criteria, recorded the decision and the alternative it discarded, and proceeded. If a decision turned out to be incorrect, it could be revisited in the morning rather than having to start over after ten hours of inactivity.

A key lesson was the importance of measuring resources at the unit level being acted upon. Long-running processes consume resources, and these leaks can be detected by monitoring the total memory usage across the machine rather than just the main process. The browser they drive grows, and other processes accumulate, leading to swapping and slowdown. The correct approach is to measure the sum of everything the browser owns and compare it against a limit, triggering a recycling action if necessary.