nightcrew is live

I shipped NightCrew — an overnight task runner for Claude Code.

The pitch is simple: write your tasks in tasks.yaml, run ./nightcrew.sh run before bed, wake up to draft PRs with plans, decision logs, and review reports attached.

What it does per task:

1. Plan (Opus) — scope challenge, architecture review, test coverage plan, failure mode analysis. Saves PLAN-{task-id}.md.
2. Implement (Sonnet) — follows the plan, writes code, runs tests, logs judgment calls to DECISIONS-{task-id}.md.
3. Review (Sonnet) — pre-landing review, auto-fixes mechanical issues, logs concerns to REVIEW-{task-id}.md.

Then it commits, pushes, opens a draft PR, and moves to the next task. Each task runs in its own git worktree, so they can't stomp on each other.

A real tasks.yaml entry:

tasks:
  - id: per-project-protected-branches
    title: "Per-project protected_branches override on tasks"
    branch: feat/per-project-protected-branches
    type: implementation
    complexity: medium
    files_in_scope:
      - schemas/task.schema.json
      - lib/00-common.sh
      - tests/protected-branches.bats
    test_command: "bats tests/"

files_in_scope is a hard fence — anything Claude writes outside it gets reverted before commit. Seven guardrails total: tool whitelists per task type, blocked ops (rm, sudo, force-push), branch protection, file scope, per-task timeouts, cost cap, secret scanning.

Output of a recent run, straight from state/progress.json:

{
  "session_id": "2026-04-17T143100Z",
  "total_cost_cents": 287,
  "total_input_tokens": 78400,
  "total_output_tokens": 21900,
  "tasks": {
    "per-project-protected-branches": {
      "status": "complete",
      "pr_url": "https://github.com/oluoyefeso/nightcrew/pull/12"
    },
    "broaden-tool-whitelist": {
      "status": "complete",
      "pr_url": "https://github.com/oluoyefeso/nightcrew/pull/13"
    }
  }
}

$2.87, two PRs, one night.

The clearest proof it works: NightCrew shipped its own v0.4.0.0 release. Two overnight runs queued four feature tasks against the NightCrew repo itself — run lockfile, preflight gitignore validation, per-project protected branches, broadened tool whitelists. Four draft PRs (#10–#13) waiting in the morning. Reviewed, merged, ran the next batch the following night.

Single bash script. No daemon, no database. The whole runtime is bash + jq + yq + gh + claude.

Source on GitHub. Next post is about cutting the token bill on overnight runs by ~21% — caveman prompts.