The Night Shift: work your crew does while you sleep

The Night Shift is a window — 22:00 to 06:00 unless you change it in Settings — when your crew is allowed to work on things that don't need you. Reviews get written, indexes get refreshed, translations catch up. In the morning there's a report waiting instead of a backlog.

The moon in the title bar shows when a shift is running and what it's working on. It also says when the period started and when it ends — a scheduled shift closes with its window, a manual one runs until the work is done — and keeps a running tally of what the shift has got through: tasks finished, files indexed and reviewed, files written, questions raised for you. During the day the same line tells you when the next window opens. You can start a shift manually too — stepping out for lunch is a perfectly good night.

Roles that bring their own night work

Some roles come with a standing suggestion for recurring work that suits them. Add a Chief Security Officer to a project, and they'll suggest a nightly security review; a Translator suggests keeping a translated shadow of your content in the project's designated language. The same goes for project types — a project set up for a job hunt suggests its weekly pipeline review.

These are suggestions, never surprises: nothing runs until you turn it on. The toggles live with the crew list in each project's Settings, and appear the moment a suggesting role joins. Turning one off pauses it — your run history stays — and "don't suggest this" hides it for that project.

What night work looks like

Night work is deliberately quiet-handed. The suggested craftbooks write reports, findings, and sidecar files — a security posture report in the artifacts drawer, translations beside the originals — rather than editing your work in place. Each enabled item runs at most once per night, inside the window. Its task transitions and tool completions that Gezel observes land in History like other work.

Some values are shared across night work: the Translator's target language, for instance, is a project property — set once in project Settings (or the first time you enable the translation run) and reused by every run after that.

Keeping your subscription quota safe

Night work on a Claude, Codex, or Copilot subscription spends the same quota you use during the day, so the Night Shift keeps a quota reserve: by default it stops sending work to a subscription once you're within 20% of a quota, leaving the rest for you. You can adjust that floor in Settings → Night Shift, or add a daily reserve that scales with the time left — 10% a day with four days until your quota resets keeps the last 40% for you.

Work that's already running always finishes; only new work is held. Held work resumes on its own when a quota window resets (if the machine is awake) or the next night, and the moon menu says what's being protected and why. Gezels on local models spend nothing and are never held.

Fixes that arrive as proposals

A project with both a Boekwachter and a developer on its crew gets one more kind of night work: the Boekwachter finds problems in your files, and overnight the developer works through them.

What arrives in the morning is not a changed project. It's a set of change proposals — one per group of problems the developer judged worth fixing together, each with the reasoning written out and the exact edits laid out line by line. Your files are untouched. You read the proposal, look at the diff, and apply it if you agree.

That's deliberate, and it has a useful consequence: it works on folders your crew isn't allowed to edit. You never have to hand over write access to get a fix drafted. It also works with nothing but the model on your own machine — no network, no service, nobody's cloud.

Proposals live in the project's Proposals tab, which appears once there's something in it. Each one shows:

• what the developer changed and why, what they were unsure of, and how to check it

• every file it touches, with the diff

• Apply (all of it, or one file at a time), Export (a zip of patches you can git apply yourself), or Dismiss

Two things it will tell you plainly. If a file changed after the proposal was written — you edited it, or a teammate did — the proposal is marked out of date and applying it asks you to confirm first, naming the files that moved. And if two proposals touch the same file, both say so, because applying one will put the other out of date.

You can start the same thing by hand any time: open a file the Boekwachter has flagged, and hit Fix on the issue. It doesn't wait for nightfall, and it produces the same reviewable proposal.

If you'd rather your crew didn't do this, turn off nightly fixing in the project's settings. It's on by default only because you assembled a crew that can do it.

The morning review

When the window closes, gezel gathers what the shift accomplished and puts it where you'll see it: the moon menu grows a Done last night list, the Home greeting gains a Last night tab, and a single question card summarizes the night with links to every report and every change proposal waiting on you.

Reports can go further than prose. A recommendation that is genuinely one click away — fire a craftbook, delegate a fix, apply a reviewed set of file edits — appears inside the report as an action card. You see exactly what would run (including the full diff for file edits) and fire it, or dismiss it, right from the page. Nothing a report suggests ever runs on its own: firing is always your click, and Gezel records the resulting task and observed tool activity in History.

For the Night Shift to run while the app is closed, enable the background service in Settings.