Running AI Agents Unattended — free field notes

This is the free half of the Headless Agent Jobs guide. The full version adds the watchdog pattern, failure taxonomy, and the production checklist.

The windowless rule

An unattended job must never open a console. Python runs under pythonw, Node hides behind a VBS shim, and everything logs to a file. Windowed jobs get disabled by annoyed users, and then the automation quietly disappears.

One writer per resource

Two jobs writing the same file is the most common silent corruption. Use a lock with a stale timeout so one crash cannot block the job forever. If you cannot describe what a second run does, the job is unfinished.

Classify failures

Transient: retry with jitter. Configuration: fail fast. State: restore, never blind-retry. Logic: stop. Most outages are misdiagnosed configuration or state errors being retried as network errors.

Full set

Three guides, $2 each in USDT (BEP20), delivered by an endpoint that verifies the payment on-chain: Agent Ops Pack