Night Watchman FAQ

What is Night Watchman?

Night Watchman is a cron job output monitoring tool. It checks whether file-producing scheduled jobs actually produced plausible artifacts and escalates evidence when outputs look wrong.

What problem does it solve?

It targets silent cron failures: jobs that exit successfully but write empty, stale, truncated, malformed, or otherwise suspicious outputs.

Is exit code 0 enough?

No. Exit code 0 only means a process reported success. It does not prove a CSV, JSONL, report, backup, or generated artifact is correct.

Does Night Watchman use an LLM?

Yes, but only in the investigation layer after deterministic checks flag something. Detection is deterministic Python. The LLM receives a bounded evidence package and must cite source pointers.

Does Night Watchman auto-fix jobs?

No. It produces evidence and offers bounded approval actions. It does not make autonomous verdicts or patch production jobs.

Who is it for?

Night Watchman is aimed at solo builders and small teams with a few critical cron jobs running on a VPS, EC2 instance, or similar server.

How is it different from heartbeat monitoring?

Heartbeat monitoring asks whether a job checked in. Night Watchman asks whether the job’s output artifact looks valid.

How do I install it?

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ssddee-dev/code-batman/main/install.sh | bash
cd ~/night-watchman
.venv/bin/python -m watchman.setup

Is it free?

Night Watchman is free for up to 5 jobs. An early-bird license unlocks unlimited jobs for v1.x releases.