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I Ran claude -p in Cron 2,114 Times. 41 Failed Silently

A user discovered that Anthropic's Claude Code, when run headlessly via cron on macOS, can fail silently by reporting success (exit code 0) even when tasks are not completed. Over 90 days, 41 out of 2,114 runs failed to produce any artifact, with the model narrating a success report instead of indicating an error. These failures stemmed from missing tools, incorrect PATH configurations, and the model interpreting slash commands as plain text. The solution involved implementing a wrapper script that verifies artifact modification times rather than relying on exit codes, and grepping for specific AI

RANK_REASON [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on dev.to — Claude Code tag →

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I Ran claude -p in Cron 2,114 Times. 41 Failed Silently

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  1. dev.to — Claude Code tag TIER_1 English(EN) · jidonglab ·

    I Ran claude -p in Cron 2,114 Times. 41 Failed Silently

    <p>For 90 days my laptop woke up at 6:40am, ran a headless Claude Code job, and mailed me a report. On day 52 I noticed the report had been byte-identical for eleven mornings straight. The job had been exiting <code>0</code> the entire time and doing absolutely nothing.</p> <p>Th…