Go to Lunch, Come Back to a PR

Up to now I've been sitting here telling Claude what to do, prompt by prompt, watching the text fly by and approving things as they go. I still work that way just about every day. Is that vibe coding? To some degree, I suppose, but I'll leave that one to you. This lesson is about the other option: setting things up so that if I go out to lunch, the work still gets done and I don't have to be part of it.

The guinea pig is issue 120 in Moebius, which has been sitting there since May 2024. It asks for Postgres's ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING, which is handy when you're bulk loading data and don't want your constraints to kick in yet. Every repo you inherit has a list like this, and asking Claude "go look at issue 120 and tell me what's in it" is redundant (I already read it) and it means I'm still the one sitting here. So I put a claude label on the issue instead, plus an in progress label so I can see what Claude is working on at a glance.

Then the fun part. Being a good programmer, your first thought might be a cron job that hits the GitHub CLI every 10 minutes. Claude Code has /loop for that: you give it an interval and a prompt and it repeats the prompt on a schedule. The interval is something like 1m or 1h, the minimum is one minute (ask for 20 seconds and Claude will happily agree, then run it every minute anyway), and a loop only runs for seven days before it stops on its own.

Here's the loop I set up, dictated with Wispr Flow:

/loop 10m Check GitHub, the remote repository here for moebius, for any open issues prioritized by priority if they're labeled as high priority or whatever. Otherwise, go oldest to newest and look for the issues labeled Claude. Those are the ones that I want you to try and fix for me.
When you fix an issue:
- Always work in a branch.
- When you're working on the issue, be sure that you also label the issue in progress so that other instances of Claude Code know that this is being worked on.
- That also means: do not pull an issue if it has an in progress tag on it.
- Add comments to the issue liberally that tell what work you're doing on that issue.
- When you're done, ready up a PR.
- If there's a reason that you can't finish or you have a question, make sure you label the issue question and remove the in progress label.

Claude turns that into a real cron job with its CronCreate tool, running as you, every 10 minutes. It finds 120, flips it to in progress, comments that it's picking the issue up on a branch, and a little while later there's PR #121 with 265 tests passing and mix quality clean. That prompt could be better, and you'll want to tune yours as you go, but this is the first small step into letting Claude work while you don't.