Draft: content in review, not yet public.
Pat Kelman
← back
Receipt · Running since February 2026

The agent that caught a backup failing silently for four weeks

Python · Claude Agent SDK · launchd · Gmail / IMAP / Calendar / Asana / Slack

Three businesses run solo means six inboxes, one calendar covering all of them, Asana tasks, drafts in flight and several Slack channels. With an ADHD brain, noisy alerts get muted, and then real signals get missed with them. The Heartbeat is the layer that watches everything and surfaces only what actually needs attention. If nothing does, it stays quiet.

It runs on the always-on Mac Mini on a thirty-minute schedule through launchd, with an active-hours guard so nothing fires overnight. Each run pulls the full picture through direct APIs, reasons over it, and decides whether to notify or stay silent. Acknowledging an item is a single ✅ reaction in Slack, which writes to a deterministic store so the same thing is never raised twice.

Six inboxes, the calendar, Asana and Slack all feed into one decision that runs every 30 minutes through launchd: pull the full picture, reason over it, decide. The branch that matters is silence versus notify. Most runs stay silent, which is the feature; only what genuinely needs attention triggers a notification, and a single acknowledgement writes to a store so the same item is never raised twice.
Everything feeds one decision every 30 minutes, and most runs end in silence; a notify is acknowledged once and never raised again.

Silence is the feature. The same vault-sync check built into it caught a backup that had been silently failing for four weeks while reporting success every hour, before that turned into lost work.