Nightly Build

Nightly Build

Your agent scans the day's conversations while you sleep, finds one friction point worth fixing, ships it, and leaves a morning briefing. No scope creep, no manufactured busywork — just steady compounding improvement.

Philosophy

> Proactive > reactive. Fix one friction point while you sleep. Ship small, reversible improvements. Leave a morning briefing.

The idea: every night, your agent reviews what happened today, spots something worth improving (a repeated manual step, an annoying workflow, a doc that's out of date), and quietly fixes it. You wake up to a brief message explaining what changed and how to undo it if you don't like it.

Over weeks, this compounds. The agent gets better at anticipating your needs before you have to ask.

Setup

1. Create NIGHTLY_BUILD.md in your workspace

Save this file to your clawd workspace root (~/clawd/NIGHTLY_BUILD.md):

# NIGHTLY_BUILD.md — The Nightly Build
Philosophy
Proactive > reactive. Fix one friction point while you sleep. Ship small, reversible improvements. Leave a morning briefing.
Schedule
Runs at 3:00 AM (your local time) via cron, after nightly memory extraction.
Process
1. Scan for friction points (~2 min)
Review today's sessions for:
Repeated manual steps or commands
Things [user] asked about but didn't finish
Complaints or annoyances mentioned in passing
Patterns across recent days (check memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md)
Stale workspace files or disorganized areas
Missing documentation or notes
Upcoming tasks that could use prep work
2. Pick ONE improvement
Choose the highest-impact, lowest-risk item. Prefer:
Things that save [user] time tomorrow morning
Things that are clearly reversible
Things that compound (better memory, better tooling, better docs)
3. Tier Check — What's allowed?
Tier 1 — Just do it (no permission needed):
Workspace/memory file organization
Shell scripts or aliases (in ~/clawd/scripts/)
Research and summaries saved to files
Documentation improvements
Memory cleanup (dedup, organize, update summaries)
Prep work for known upcoming tasks
New skills or cron job drafts (saved as files, not deployed)
Tier 2 — Prep but don't deploy (queue for morning review):
Changes to code repos (create branch + PR draft, don't merge)
New cron jobs or config changes
Anything that changes how existing tools work
Tier 3 — Never without permission:
External-facing actions (emails, messages, posts)
Spending money
Deleting data
Production deployments
4. Build it
Keep it small — if you can't explain it in one sentence, it's too big
Make it reversible — git commits, not direct edits to important files
Document what you did and why
5. Morning Briefing
Send [user] a message at completion with:
🌙 Nightly Build Report
What I built: [one sentence]
Why: [what friction I noticed]
How to undo: [one command or "delete X file"]
Tier 2 queue: [anything prepped but waiting for your OK]
If nothing worth building → skip silently. Don't manufacture busywork.
Anti-patterns
❌ Scope creep ("while I'm here...")
❌ Building something cool but useless
❌ Touching things [user] intentionally left a certain way
❌ Manufacturing work to look industrious
❌ Breaking the chain of provenance (always explain WHY)

2. Add the cron job

Run this in your OpenClaw session:

Add a nightly cron job called "nightly-build" that runs at 3 AM every night.
It should fire a systemEvent on the main session with this text:
"🌙 Nightly Build: Time to ship one improvement while [user] sleeps.
Read ~/clawd/NIGHTLY_BUILD.md and follow the process:
1. Scan today's sessions for friction points (use sessions_list + sessions_history)
2. Check recent memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md files for patterns
3. Pick ONE small, reversible, high-impact improvement
4. Tier check: only Tier 1 work gets shipped. Tier 2 gets prepped.
5. Build it
6. Send morning briefing to [user] via your configured messaging channel
If nothing worth building tonight, skip silently."

Or configure it directly via cron tool:

{
  "name": "nightly-build",
  "schedule": { "kind": "cron", "expr": "0 3 * * *", "tz": "America/Chicago" },
  "sessionTarget": "main",
  "payload": {
    "kind": "systemEvent",
    "text": "🌙 Nightly Build: Time to ship one improvement while you sleep.\n\nRead ~/clawd/NIGHTLY_BUILD.md and follow the process:\n1. Scan today's sessions for friction points (use sessions_list + sessions_history)\n2. Check recent memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md files for patterns\n3. Pick ONE small, reversible, high-impact improvement\n4. Tier check: only Tier 1 work gets shipped. Tier 2 gets prepped.\n5. Build it\n6. Send morning briefing via your configured messaging channel\n\nIf nothing worth building tonight, skip silently."
  }
}

What It Does Each Night

The agent follows a fixed process:

1. Scans sessions — uses sessions_list + sessions_history to review the day's conversations 2. Reads daily notes — checks memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md for patterns across recent days 3. Identifies friction — repeated commands, unfinished requests, missing docs, stale files 4. Picks ONE thing — the highest-impact, most reversible improvement 5. Checks the tier — Tier 1 ships immediately, Tier 2 gets prepped as a draft/PR 6. Builds it — shell scripts, documentation, memory cleanup, prep work 7. Sends a briefing — one short message explaining what changed and how to undo it

Customization

Edit NIGHTLY_BUILD.md to:

Tips

1. Create NIGHTLY_BUILD.md in your workspace

Save this file to your clawd workspace root (~/clawd/NIGHTLY_BUILD.md):

```markdown

NIGHTLY_BUILD.md — The Nightly Build