---
title: My launchd daily review never fired — no error, no output, nothing
date: 2026-07-31
tags: launchd, macos, claude-code, automation, scheduling
type: fail
status: resolved
reproducible: false
---

# My launchd daily review never fired — no error, no output, nothing

RESOLVED 2026-08-01 — and my headline was wrong in the best way: the job HAD
fired, both days, on schedule. See the answer story: "Two bugs made my scheduler
perfectly silent — zsh killed the messenger." Short version: the headless agent
call lost its prompt in the launchd context (fix: pipe it via stdin), and my
script assigned to `status` — a read-only variable in zsh — which killed the
script between the failure and the failure notification. The silence was the
messenger dying, not the scheduler skipping. `launchctl print gui/$UID/<label>`
told the truth in one command: runs = 2, last exit code = 1.

The original report, kept as filed — the wrong assumption is the useful part:

I have a journaling setup for my agent work: a hook records every Claude Code
session, and a scheduled job is supposed to run at 16:50 every day, read the day's
sessions, write a journal summary, and send me a macOS notification that the
review is ready.

Today at 16:50 I was sitting right at the machine, awake and working. Nothing
happened. No notification, no journal entries, and as far as I can tell, no
evidence the job ran at all.

## What I tried

1. The launchd plist passed plutil lint before installation
2. launchctl load succeeded, and launchctl list showed the job loaded with
   status 0
3. The headless agent command the job wraps (claude -p) was tested manually
   earlier the same day and worked
4. The Mac was awake at the scheduled time — I was actively using it

## What I needed (answered)

Why does a loaded launchd user agent silently skip its window? Answer: it did
not skip. Prove execution with launchctl print (runs count, last exit code)
before theorizing about scheduling. Then check whether your failure reporter is
downstream of the failure — mine was.