Night Orders

A captain's night order book, for a portfolio of small ventures run by one person and one coding agent: judgment written down at dusk, executed by the watch overnight, the captain woken only under named conditions.

This is the machine that lets Claude Code work unattended on ~/ventures while its operator sleeps, travels, or is simply away from the laptop — without ever being able to spend money, push code, widen its own permissions, or rewrite its own orders. It was built by the operator with Claude over about a month of nightly runs; every rule below was promoted from something that went wrong first.

The five laws

Separate judgment from labor in time. An order is frozen judgment; the meeting is where judgment lives, the night is where labor lives.
Trust is structural, not behavioral. Arrange the world so the bad thing is impossible or absent; a branch is a fact you can diff, a rule is a hope.
Grade evidence, never claims. Reports where lying is detectable; the wrapper's envelope, not the model, is the authority on time and cost.
The alarm never lives inside the thing it watches. A system cannot report its own absence.
Learnings compound only at the point of use, and recurring ones get promoted until they become physics.

The six pieces

Piece	Files	What it does
The fence	`settings.json`	Claude Code project permissions: an explicit allowlist scoped to `~/ventures`, read-only git verbs, no shells, no `rm`, no `push`, no MCP auth. Deny rules keep the run out of its own charter, orders, loops, ops tooling, and every dotfile.
The captain's book	`pm/CHARTER.md`, `pm/LOOPS.md` (plus `ORDERS.md` and `LOG.md`, not shipped)	Human-edited only. The charter holds the dials (model, effort, budget caps, WIP limit) and the blast radius. Loops are standing orders that renew themselves nightly under a budget and a TTL.
The night runner	`ops/night/run-night.sh`, `night-prompt.md`, `night-mcp.json`	The wrapper: reads dials from the charter, skips if nothing is runnable, preflights the cost ledger, runs an auth canary, snapshots nested repos onto `night/<date>` branches, invokes `claude -p` with zero MCP servers and a hard timeout, persists the envelope, commits the tree, appends the ledger row, writes an alert file on anything but `ok`.
Capture and watchdog	`ops/capture/poller.sh`, `watchdog-absence.sh`	Fires every 10 minutes while the machine is awake; runs a lane at the first window that fits its physics (night needs AC power; day accepts lid-open battery ≥ 50%). The watchdog alarms only when a window existed and nothing ran, never on calendar silence.
Health desk	`ops/health/fleet-health.py`, `judge-night.sh`, `judge-night.md`	Morning ground truth. Deterministic trajectory scorers over the session transcripts the run cannot edit (step budget, repeat loops, denied-then-retried, protected-path writes, git mutations), plus an LLM judge that grades the night's report against the diff of what it actually wrote.
The disciplines	`skills/{pm,brand,growth,finance,launch-business}`	Five Claude Code skills. `pm` is the chief of staff and runs the standup; the other four each own one thing (voice and design, the honest signal, the economic verdict, the launch pipeline) and refuse the others'.

How a night runs

The poller sees AC power, stamps the window, and invokes the wrapper under caffeinate.
The wrapper reads the charter dials, counts unchecked ## Tonight orders, and asks a deterministic Python block which loops are runnable (cadence, budget by iteration count, two-consecutive-no-progress auto-park). Nothing runnable means a one-line state file and exit.
Budget preflight against the cost ledger: rolling 7-day and monthly caps, and a pause after two consecutive over-cap nights.
An auth canary (Reply with exactly: READY) proves the CLI is logged in before any real spend.
Every nested venture repo gets a pre-night snapshot commit and a night/<date> branch.
claude -p runs the night prompt with --strict-mcp-config against an empty MCP config, project-only settings, and a hard timeout. One retry on a non-timeout failure.
The result envelope is persisted to pm/nights/<date>-envelope.md before anything else can fail. The tree is committed as ventures-night. A ledger row is appended.
Anything but ok writes ALERT.md and fires a macOS notification. The morning standup reads the alert, then the health desk, then the report, then the diff.

launchd wiring (plists not shipped)

Two user LaunchAgents, both RunAtLoad:

com.ventures.capture: runs ops/capture/poller.sh with StartInterval 600.
com.ventures.capture-watchdog: runs ops/capture/watchdog-absence.sh with StartInterval 3600.

The wrapper itself has no schedule. Opportunistic capture replaced fixed-time firing after fixed times kept landing on a closed laptop.

Adopting it

Copy this folder's contents into ~/ventures/ so the layout is ~/ventures/.claude/settings.json, ~/ventures/.claude/skills/*, ~/ventures/00-ops/{night,capture,health}, ~/ventures/pm/.
Replace /Users/YOU in settings.json with your home directory. Claude Code permission paths are absolute.
Edit pm/CHARTER.md: presence mode, shadow rate, budget caps. Write an ORDERS.md with a ## Tonight section of - [ ] orders, each with Definition of done, Out of scope, and If blocked.
Optional env: NIGHT_GIT_NAME / NIGHT_GIT_EMAIL for snapshot commits, CLAUDE_BIN if the CLI is not on PATH, JUDGE_MODEL for the health desk.
Run NIGHT_PROBE=1 bash 00-ops/night/run-night.sh first. It exercises every guard and stops before invoking the model.
Load the two LaunchAgents. Read 00-ops/health/REPORT.md the next morning.

Everything in here was written with Claude Code; the judgment about what to fence and why is the operator's.