--- title: The agent runs while you sleep. Design for that. | daily.dev description: Running AI agents unattended on a schedule introduces risks that interactive use hides: silent compounding mistakes, overlapping runs, partial failures, and no... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-agent-runs-while-you-sleep-design-for-that--xckrhtslo twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The agent runs while you sleep. Design for that. | daily.dev og:description: Running AI agents unattended on a schedule introduces risks that interactive use hides: silent compounding mistakes, overlapping runs, partial failures, and no... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-agent-runs-while-you-sleep-design-for-that--xckrhtslo og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/XCkrhTSLo.png og:image:alt: The agent runs while you sleep. Design for that. og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The agent runs while you sleep. Design for that. **[Medium](https://daily.dev/sources/medium_js)** · 7 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Running AI agents unattended on a schedule introduces risks that interactive use hides: silent compounding mistakes, overlapping runs, partial failures, and no human reviewer. The post outlines five design principles for safe unattended agents: enforce safety outside the model via server-side policies rather than prompts; split actions by blast radius, queuing irreversible ones for human approval; make every write idempotent with structural checks like anchor matching and checksums; default to reporting over acting when confidence is low; and maintain a full audit trail of every action taken, refused, or deferred. The core argument is that autonomy is earned through scaffolding around the model, not by trusting the model itself more. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Trustworthy Productivity: Securing AI Accelerated Development](https://daily.dev/posts/trustworthy-productivity-securing-ai-accelerated-development-v8mtkdb7v) · InfoQ · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-agent-runs-while-you-sleep-design-for-that--xckrhtslo) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The agent runs while you sleep. 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