FIELD NOTE 10 / USEFUL UNATTENDED WORK
Automate the check before the job.
Move repeatable work off your keyboard without losing the ability to inspect it.
A recurring prompt needs a definition of success, a failure path, and a way to stop. Build those while you can still watch the job run.
“The rule for letting go: the job needs a deterministic gate it cannot talk its way past.”
Paul’s working notes · September 2026
What it looks like
“Every day, improve my website.”
Every weekday: inspect the approved source. If something changed: prepare a draft. Check: source links resolve and required fields exist. Publish: only after human approval. Stop: repeated failures or the run budget.
Put it to work
- 01
Make one manual run work.
Write down the inputs, output, schedule and timezone, owner, and allowed actions. Save a good result. If the task is only moving known values between systems, a normal script may be simpler than an agent.
- 02
Add the pass/fail check.
Use deterministic checks where possible: a schema, a test suite, a row count, or a known file. Define a retry cap, run budget, and failure destination. Make repeated runs safe so a retry does not send the same message or create the same record twice.
- 03
Choose the model deliberately, then observe.
Use a capable model for the uncertain decision and consider a smaller model for a proven, bounded procedure. Compare quality on real examples before switching. Confirm the actual provider and model used by scheduled jobs. In Hermes, scheduled work has its own documented execution and model-selection behavior.
Give this to your AI
Adapt the brackets to your task.Help me turn [manual workflow] into a proposed automation. Specify the trigger and timezone, inputs, exact output, allowed actions, deterministic checks, retry limit, cost or run limit, duplicate prevention, failure notification, owner, and stop control. Start with a dry run that cannot publish, send, delete, or modify production. If a simple script is enough, recommend it. Do not create the schedule until the dry-run result has been reviewed.
My prompt history shows prompts falling 68% from June to August while commits stayed high. I attribute part of that shift to unattended work. It is an observation from one workflow, not a controlled productivity measurement.
A repeatable job deserves a repeatable check.
Sources & further reading
Personal counts are from Paul’s prompt-history analysis. Tool guidance was checked against these sources in September 2026. Confirm current behavior in your installed version.