Job Babysitter

Purpose

Stop manually polling long-running background jobs. Instead of dozens-to-hundreds of ls -lh / ps checks while guessing at completion, start one background watcher that detects the terminal state via plateau heuristics, then routes a verdict — done, needs-attention, or blocked — with the exact next command.

A night-shift nurse for background jobs: it checks vitals on a schedule and escalates only when something is actually wrong.

When to use

Use when a job will run long enough that babysitting it by hand wastes attention:

• Media encodes / transcodes (ffmpeg, video-transcribe, audio extraction)
• Embedding or vector-DB builds (qmd embed, index builds)
• Batch agent / LLM pipelines run in the background
• Browser / scrape daemons (real-browser, agent-browser) prone to hanging