nightshift

Give the agent a shift. Come back to work you can review.

Nightshift gives Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Cursor a durable work contract for long coding runs. Plan the work with the agent first, then bring a task list, choose a ready-made shift, or give your agent an objective and hours to work. A clock-out gate holds unfinished work, each item can carry the evidence you ask for and a time or token budget, progress survives on disk, and a watchman can recover failed sessions. Review the results, per-item token usage and time where available, then archive the shift with its evidence intact.

MIT licensed · macOS, Linux, Windows · No separate service or API key

Install · First shift · Real runs · Why it exists · Documentation · Website

What you want	What Nightshift provides
Design the work before building it	A plan room that explores the code with you, offers a pre-mortem, an edge-case pass and an ordering check, sizes the plan from your past receipts, and builds nothing until you leave.
Finish the work you already planned	A persistent punch list, item-by-item verification, and a gate that rejects premature clock-out.
Put a few hours into the project	Open-ended product evolution, coverage hunts, or your own objective, with an explicit deadline and a continuation record.
Start without writing a backlog	Ready-made shifts through Hunt and Quality. Choose the work yourself or let the agent compose it; review first or run directly.
See proof, not just a tick	An evidence line per item from a catalog of kinds, an optional file map in each receipt, and your choice of whether missing evidence holds the clock-out.
Keep each item in bounds	Soft and hard limits per item in working time, tokens, or both. A hard limit turns the agent to wrap-up and closes the item as stopped.
Keep a long run moving	Progress across compaction, parked decisions, deduplicated findings, and recovery under the host's supported signals.
See what the work consumed	Runtime-measured token usage and duration per item, with host-specific gaps clearly marked.

Real runs. The four-hour first night left nine focused items as reviewable commits. A later 45-hour contract survived a host handoff and became a human-reviewed 67-commit pull request. These are documented runs, not benchmarks.

Why Nightshift

It started with eight requested changes and a screen saying the four hard ones deserved a “focused session.” The agent had finished the easy work and left the rest for later.

Nightshift makes the remaining work explicit at every attempted stop. The list survives context compaction, decisions go into a parking lot with a default, and a watchman can recover failed sessions. The checks and your review still determine whether a completed item is good. Read the story and see the original screenshot →

Install

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add orwa-mahmoud/nightshift
/plugin install nightshift

Codex

codex plugin marketplace add orwa-mahmoud/nightshift
codex plugin add nightshift@nightshift

Review and trust the plugin's hooks (/hooks in the CLI), then start a new conversation. The OpenAI Plugin Directory listing is a skills-only edition for attended sessions and ChatGPT, without the clock-out gate, recovery or usage accounting.

Cursor

Open Customize → Add → From GitHub Repository, paste https://github.com/orwa-mahmoud/nightshift, select Import, then install Nightshift from the imported marketplace.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗