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What this tool does (plain English)

The problem

Andrew runs Claude overnight on long autonomous coding missions. Claude itself is responsible for waking him (through his Pavlok wristband) if something goes wrong. But on July 8, 2026, Claude's service went down for about six hours in the middle of the night — and since the thing that does the paging was Claude, nobody got woken up. Six hours of overnight work time were lost.

The fix

A small, independent night watchman that lives on the PC itself, completely separate from Claude. Windows runs it automatically every 15 minutes between midnight and 8 AM. Each time it wakes up it asks three questions:

  1. Is an overnight mission running? Missions leave a small "flag file" on disk when they start. No flag, nothing to guard — go back to sleep.
  2. Is Claude actually working? Whenever Claude works, it writes to its session log files. The watchman just looks at the timestamp of the most recent write.
  3. Has it been quiet too long? If the logs have been untouched for two hours or more during a mission, something is wrong — Claude is down, stuck, or crashed.

If all three say "trouble", the watchman fires the Pavlok wake-up sequence (vibrate → beep → strong zaps, the same ladder that reliably wakes Andrew). If he doesn't respond and things stay quiet, it pages again every 30 minutes, up to three times a night — the same safety budget the wristband tool already enforces on its own.

How it stands down

  • Claude starts writing again → all clear, incident closed automatically.
  • Andrew wakes up and removes the mission flag → watchman goes quiet.
  • The flag expires on its own after the mission's planned hours, so a forgotten flag can't cause pages the next night.

What it will never do

It never restarts anything, never closes programs, and never reboots the PC. It only reads timestamps, keeps a small diary of what it saw, and — when truly necessary — buzzes a wristband.