Put your idle AI hardware to work while you sleep.
Here's the problem Night Shift solves: you already own AI hardware — a MacBook with unified memory, a gaming GPU, a spare desktop — and every night it sits idle. Those are free tokens. The hardware is paid for; the electricity costs cents. Night Shift collects them: overnight, your machines read your repo, find small safe work, and draft. You wake up to a short ranked brief with the few things worth looking at first.
It never pushes, merges, releases, or touches credentials. Drafts, not deploys. Free and open source under the MIT License.
Morning brief — status: YELLOW
1. Missing tests around config fallback loading → patch plan ready to review
2. Setup docs still reference an old command → small docs fix drafted
3. One manual QA claim needs a human check → flagged, not trusted
Local loops: 40 · Windows loops: 20 · Artifacts: KEEP=3 MAYBE=7 REJECT=50
Draft PRs opened: 0
Next action: verify item 1 and open one narrow draft PR if the gap is real.
Every item is a ranked, source-backed suggestion with proof paths — not merged
code. That YELLOW is intentional: the machines did useful work overnight,
and you (or your coding agent) still make the call in the morning.
git clone https://github.com/r3dbars/nightshift.git
cd nightshift
./install.sh
night-shift start # friendly guided setup, then the overnight runNext morning:
night-shift report --latestWorks with: LM Studio, Ollama (auto-detected), or any OpenAI-compatible local model server · a second GPU box on your LAN as a heavy draft lane · optionally the Claude CLI for one or two hard questions a night and the GitHub CLI for open-PR context.
No local models yet? night-shift start still works: it makes a read-only
planning brief and tells you exactly what to set up.
You shouldn't have to remember Night Shift exists. Arm it once and your hardware clocks in every night by itself:
night-shift schedule --nightly 23:30 # runs every night with your saved setup
night-shift schedule --status # when it runs, what happened, how to stop
night-shift snooze --days 7 # vacation switchThe standing shift looks after itself: it pauses when three morning briefs
pile up unread (no zombie automation making reports nobody reads — reading
one resumes it), drops to quiet mode on battery, and turns off with one
command. Optionally, night-shift deliver --latest --github-issue keeps a
single digest issue in your repo updated with each morning's brief — the only
thing Night Shift ever writes to a repo, and never code. The full design:
docs/autopilot.md.
+--------------+ +----------------------+ +---------------+
| Your repo | --> | Night Shift | --> | Morning brief |
| Your compute | --> | local / GPU / cloud | --> | KEEP / MAYBE |
+--------------+ +----------------------+ +---------------+
- Scan the repo: recent files, TODOs, missing tests, docs drift, open PRs.
- Queue a small, repo-specific list of safe work from those real signals.
- Work it with bounded local and network worker loops, all night.
- Dedupe and rank: repeated findings merge into fewer, stronger candidates.
- Brief you in the morning with the 3-5 best next actions, with evidence.
You choose how much it may prepare:
| Autonomy | What you get |
|---|---|
brief (default) |
read-only repo scan, ranked work queue, morning brief |
draft-local |
+ exact patch plans, issue candidates, and test ideas |
draft-prs |
+ review-ready draft PR candidates — still no push, no merge |
And how hard it runs:
| Mode | Use it for | Rough shape |
|---|---|---|
quiet |
battery, small repos, short evenings | ~8 worker loops, low heat |
night-shift |
the normal overnight run | ~60 loops, ~500k local tokens |
afterburner |
maximizing idle hardware | ~200 loops, 2M+ local tokens |
- Push commits or merge PRs from an overnight run.
- Release, deploy, publish, tag, or notarize.
- Touch credentials, billing, or repository visibility.
- Move or delete your files.
- Pretend an unverified draft is the truth.
Code changes are PR-only: after the run, you (or your coding agent) review one item, make the change in an isolated worktree, run the checks, and open a draft PR yourself. The full boundary lives in SAFETY.md.
- Autopilot design — how the standing nightly run stays trustworthy: attention-aware pausing, battery awareness, snooze, and opt-in morning delivery.
- User guide — the setup wizard walkthrough, every file a run produces, advanced recipes, and full mode details.
- 20 use cases — from "solo Mac with LM Studio" to "messy PR queue" to full tokenmaxx nights.
- Copy-paste examples — including a fake sample morning brief.
- Safety and privacy — what each worker lane can see and why the boundaries exist.
- Troubleshooting · Contributing · Changelog
The Night Shift helper: tiny, caffeinated, and only allowed to make drafts until a human checks the work.
MIT © r3dbars · LICENSE