{"slug": "building-software-with-an-amnesiac-agent-notes-on-a-resumable-overnight-build", "title": "Building software with an amnesiac agent: notes on a resumable overnight build loop", "summary": "A developer built a resumable overnight build loop using an autonomous coding agent that starts each session with zero memory. The system externalizes state through granular checkpoints, decision logging, and guardrails that prevent irreversible operations. The agent produced a working full-stack monorepo including a scheduling engine, multi-tenant auth, and database schema across multiple unattended runs.", "body_md": "I wanted to see how far an autonomous coding agent could get unattended. The constraint that makes this hard isn't code generation — it's that each session starts with zero memory of the last. So the design problem is state, not prompting.\n\n**Setup**\n\n**The run loop**\n\nEvery session does the same thing:\n\nCommit granularity = checkpoint granularity. Worst case on an interrupted session is losing one unit, and the next run re-derives it. The \"why\" lines matter as much as the diffs — without them a later session re-litigates settled decisions.\n\n**Guardrails**\n\nThe agent was allowed to build, test, and commit locally. It was explicitly not allowed to deploy, push to a remote, or touch secrets — those get written into PROGRESS.md as \"needs human\" items instead. This boundary is what makes unattended runs safe to leave alone.\n\n**What came out**\n\nA working full-stack monorepo: a pure TS scheduling engine (with property tests), multi-tenant auth, a Drizzle/Postgres schema, server-side re-validation, and publish/share/export flows. Across the runs it cleared its own stale git lock, and one session caught and fixed an off-by-one in a labeling layer that spanned five files.\n\n**The takeaway**\n\nThe leverage wasn't the model writing code. It was designing a process where progress is durable across total context loss — externalize state, checkpoint constantly, log decisions not just actions, and fence off irreversible operations.\n\nRepo/stack details in comments. Curious how others are handling agent state across sessions — file-based like this, or something more structured?", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/building-software-with-an-amnesiac-agent-notes-on-a-resumable-overnight-build", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/dheeraj16/building-software-with-an-amnesiac-agent-notes-on-a-resumable-overnight-build-loop-32kg", "published_at": "2026-06-16 06:35:13+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-16 06:47:15.157641+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "developer-tools", "machine-learning", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["Drizzle", "Postgres", "TypeScript"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/building-software-with-an-amnesiac-agent-notes-on-a-resumable-overnight-build", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/building-software-with-an-amnesiac-agent-notes-on-a-resumable-overnight-build.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/building-software-with-an-amnesiac-agent-notes-on-a-resumable-overnight-build.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/building-software-with-an-amnesiac-agent-notes-on-a-resumable-overnight-build.jsonld"}}