claude-overnight 0.2.1

Queue research questions all day. Wake up to answers. Puts your idle Claude Code quota to work while you sleep.

claude-overnight

Queue research questions all day. Wake up to answers.

Your Claude Code weekly limit quietly expires while you sleep — if you hit the 5-hour cap every day, you still leave weekly quota on the table every single night. claude-overnight puts that idle quota to work: queue questions with /queue during the day, and a scheduler runs them headlessly inside your configured night window, when your limits have reset. You wake up to a folder of markdown research reports and a morning digest.

you (2:14 pm) ──▶ /queue what are the tradeoffs of CRDTs vs OT for a collab editor?
you (5:40 pm) ──▶ /queue compare litestream vs. postgres logical replication for a side project

              💤  3:00 am — limits reset, window open, batch runs

you (8:05 am) ──▶ ~/.overnight/results/index.md
                  ✅ tradeoffs of CRDTs vs OT — crdts-vs-ot.md
                  ✅ litestream vs postgres replication — litestream-vs-postgres.md

Why

• Limit-aware, not just time-aware. Cron can run Claude at 3am, but it doesn't know whether your 5-hour window is fresh or your weekly cap is nearly gone. claude-overnight checks both before starting and between every job, and stops at a configurable threshold so you wake up with quota left for actual work.
• Runs on your subscription, unattended. Jobs execute through claude -p (headless mode) with tools restricted to web search — no API key, no extra cost.
• Zero dependencies. Pure Python standard library. uv tool install claude-overnight and you're done.

Install

uv tool install claude-overnight   # or: pipx install claude-overnight
overnight install                  # sets up the scheduler + /queue slash command

overnight install does two things:

1. Registers a scheduler — a launchd agent on macOS, a systemd user timer on Linux — that wakes every 30 minutes, checks whether you're inside the night window and under the limit thresholds, and runs the queue if so.
2. Drops a /queue slash command into ~/.claude/commands/, so you can queue questions without leaving Claude Code.

Requires macOS or Linux, Python 3.11+, and the Claude Code CLI with a Pro/Max subscription. Also installable as a Claude Code plugin (/plugin marketplace add rohanprichard/claude-overnight) or an agent skill (npx skills add rohanprichard/claude-overnight).

Use

# from anywhere
overnight add "how do sqlite WAL checkpoints actually work?"

# or inside any Claude Code session
/queue how do sqlite WAL checkpoints actually work?

overnight list        # see the queue
overnight status      # current 5h/weekly utilization + would-it-run-now
overnight run --force # run the batch right now, ignoring window/limits

Results land in ~/.overnight/results/<date>/, one markdown report per question, with a rolling index.md digest. A macOS notification fires when the batch finishes.

Configure

~/.overnight/config.toml:

[window]
start = "01:00"   # jobs only run between these local times
end = "07:00"     # windows may cross midnight ("23:00" → "06:00")

[limits]
start_max_utilization = 20   # don't start if the 5h window is already >20% used
stop_utilization = 60        # stop the batch once 5h usage crosses 60%
weekly_max_utilization = 80  # never run if the weekly limit is >80% used

[run]
model = "sonnet"
job_timeout_minutes = 15
max_attempts = 2

How it works (there's no official API)

Claude Code doesn't expose a usage API — but it stores an OAuth token locally (macOS Keychain / ~/.claude/.credentials.json), and the community discovered that GET https://api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage with that token returns your 5-hour and weekly utilization with reset timestamps. claude-overnight uses that to decide when it's safe to run.

Because the endpoint is undocumented and could change, everything degrades gracefully: if usage can't be read, the runner proceeds optimistically and detects limit errors from claude -p output instead — a job that hits the limit is requeued untouched for the next window, and the batch stops.

Full details in docs/how-it-works.md.

Edge cases handled

• Machine asleep at 3am — launchd (and systemd with Persistent=true) runs the missed tick on wake, so the batch runs when you open the lid, still before you start working.
• One job eating the whole window — per-job timeouts plus utilization re-checks between jobs.
• Two runners racing — lockfile with stale-lock recovery.
• Headless Claude wanting to ask you something — the prompt template instructs it to make reasonable assumptions and state them.
• Weekly cap already blown — the runner skips the batch and says why in overnight status.

Uninstall

overnight uninstall            # removes the scheduler + slash command
uv tool uninstall claude-overnight
rm -rf ~/.overnight            # queue, results, config

Roadmap

• Repo-scoped coding jobs (run in a git worktree, results as branches)
• "Quota saved this week" stats in overnight status
• Pluggable backends: the queue, scheduler, and threshold logic are agent-agnostic — only the claude -p invocation and the limits reader are Claude-specific. Codex (codex exec) and Cursor CLI backends are on the table if there's demand.

License

MIT