I set the plan at 10:30 at night and go to sleep. The agents build until they're done or blocked. My job starts in the morning, when I review what showed up.
On one long session, execution autonomy landed somewhere north of 95%. Plan set at 10:30pm, zero interventions overnight. I didn't wake up to babysit a stuck run. That number sounds like the point, but it isn't. Autonomy is easy to fake. You can hit 95% by lowering the bar for what counts as done.
What makes it real is whether I can trust the morning review. The build I hold up as the standard is one Claude Code finished at 01:12. By the time I looked, there was working code, a benchmark, three evidence files, and a script called autoloop-smoke.sh that re-derives every number in the report when you run it. I didn't have to trust the summary. I ran the script and watched the numbers come back the same.
That's the line for me. A night build I can't re-verify in the morning isn't done, however clean the summary reads. If the only proof a thing worked is the agent telling me it worked, I've automated the work and kept none of the accountability. Re-derivation is how I keep the accountability without staying up for it.
So the queue has a shape. At night I set the plan, because taste doesn't automate and I'm not going to pretend it does. The agents run. In the morning I read the evidence, rerun the smoke script, and either accept or reject. The accept and the reject are mine. Deciding what's worth building is mine. The typing, more and more, is not.
The failure mode I watch for is the run that "passed" and can't prove it. Green summary, no re-derivable numbers, nothing I can rerun. That build goes back in the queue, because a pass I can't reproduce is a story, and I've been burned by my own stories before. What I want from every overnight run is that morning-me can re-derive the result without trusting night-me's agent.