Mark Shust ran Claude overnight via a custom plugin and Telegram bot to auto-generate a notes-on-video feature for his course platform. The AI explored the codebase, built the feature with TDD tests, ran a code review, and opened a pull request. He merged it after minor tweaks, proving indie developers can ship features while sleeping.
So I think it may finally be time to start giving more autonomy to the AI. Let me show you why. Here's my custom course platform. We have the left sidebar to navigate through all of the lessons. We have the main content area with a video and an enhanced transcript. And then we have a right sidebar where you can chat with the AI tutor. You can leave comments, or you can actually leave a note on a lesson. This last part is pretty cool because you can play a lesson And if you are at a specific spot, you can jot down a note. You can hit add note. It leaves the actual time of the video. So if you're somewhere else in the video and you come back to this lesson, you can tap the timestamp and it'll go right back to that part of the video. The shocker here though is this entire notes section was ideated, developed, and created all by Cloud Code without any of my intervention. I built a custom app on my computer called mClaw and it allows me to interface with Cloud Code when I'm not at my computer. And I could do this right through Telegram. And I rolled over in bed last night and thought, hey, wouldn't it be cool to wake up and just have an entirely new feature on my site? So I sat back and wrote up this prompt. Can you execute a Cloud Code session at Codex, which is what I call my custom course platform, and I named it before those other guys, which explores the codebase and kicks off a fully automated process that identifies one new key feature to implement, which would be incredibly useful and provide an immense measure of value to its users and kick off and run the process fully autonomously from creation through completion, including pushing up to a remote branch or making an OR PR using this HCF plugin, which is a custom plugin that I developed and bypass permissions mode enabled. The idea is that I can wake up And find the PR pending so I can just review and choose whether it's ready to be merged in or not. Stop after the PR is created. Do not merge into main. If I request any updates to this after the fact, make them directly in the previous Claude Code session so everything retains the context within that session, including HCF for tests, capability to enter remote control from the Claude app, and etc. Your goal is to work while I sleep. And surprise me with your work. Go. So I waited just a few moments and got this message passed over to me. Codex Overnight, a watchdog stood up. It's running, go to sleep. And I really didn't read much else and I went to bed. And then I woke up and had a message back. Hey, Codex Overnight, the PR is up. Autonomous session finished. Review this PR when you wake up. And I opened it up over on GitHub and noticed a full PR. Explaining why this is worth building and what it built, candidates it suggested and rejected, and so on. And I actually tested this all out locally, made just a few padding and layout changes after I reviewed it and deployed it right to production. Now note that it also did write unit tests. I did test it out locally and make sure it works. So there was still a human in the loop. And this was really only made possible because of my HCF plugin, which runs everything through an orchestrated plan, runs a devil's advocate review, creates unit tests with TDD using Kent Beck's methodology, and so on. And it's a very regimented approach which allows you to automatically create code with a high level of fidelity and really get things working right the first time. It also tells me exactly what to test and where things could get caught up. So I did look over those and everything passed with flying colors. And it also did leave a link to the session on Claude Code. And when I opened that up, I did have a full remote session over here that explained everything that it passed to Claude Code running on my machine. So this whole prompt ran on my machine and then enabled it with that remote control so I could actually pull up the full session from my mobile device and see it running and interact with this full session. So you could see it's very orchestrated. This isn't just a one-shot prompt. There's a whole process in place that makes this possible. And I can actually go through the entire session and see all of the tasks that it created with the dependency graph, the post-implementation, a standards enforcer, and so on. And I can see a link to the related PR right here. I think it is very important not to just create senseless features, but when I reviewed this, it actually made sense to me as a student that I can just come in and leave notes on a lesson. I've actually had this request come up from a few students before. So you do have to use your own mind and judgment of whether or not to merge things in. But I think I will actually set this up as a process to run every single night, or at least a few times a week, so it can consistently provide value to my students without me needing to do anything. Well, I would be doing something actually, is using my judgment to ensure that the feature makes sense and it's tested and works well. But I think this can open up a wide range of possibilities for solo indie developers and those with smaller teams and allow them to ship so much more code with very little effort. What do you think? And again, this is only made possible because of my HCF plugin. You can grab the full prompt for this entire workflow session that I created on the fly right below. And you can also check out HCF, which is how all of this was made possible.
