Unattended operation

This is a policy, not a schedule. It begins when a person hands the session over and names what may proceed without them, and it ends when they come back. Everything mechanical — the beat, the threshold, the checkpoint, resume — is session-heartbeat, which this skill requires and does not restate.

The whole mode rests on one asymmetry: with nobody watching, nothing gets caught. A wrong call has hours to propagate before anyone sees it, and by then later work is built on top of it. So the bar for acting is not "is this correct" but "if this is wrong, can it still be undone before anyone notices?"

When to use

• A human says to keep working while they are away or asleep.
• You are inside such a window and something wants to act outside the repo.
• A hard stop named at handover is about to be crossed.
• A wake, a green check, or another agent's approval is about to be treated as permission.
• The human's first message after the window arrives.

When NOT to use

• A long attended run — the human is there to be asked. session-heartbeat alone.
• Time of day. The mode is never inferred from the clock, from silence, or from a human going quiet. No directive, no mode. (This is why the skill is not named after the night: #174's own rule is that the hour never starts it.)
• Dark mode, colour schemes, night themes → designing-elite-ui.