Handing off long jobs

You'll finish with: Work running while you do something else.

Some jobs take twenty minutes. You don't want to sit there watching.

Watch it once, then walk away

First runYou watch. Fix the wording where it drifts.
Second runSame job, different folder. You watch again.
Third runHand it off. Go do something else.
NeverHand off something you've never seen work

What this is good for

Reading every file in a folder and pulling out a summary
Reformatting or renaming a batch of documents
Cross-checking a year of invoices against a spreadsheet
Anything where the answer matters and the process doesn't

Don't hand off what you haven't watched once. Run the job in front of you the first time. A successful supervised run is evidence the workflow holds — it is not a guarantee that every future run will be correct. Different inputs produce different behaviour. Spot-check the output of background jobs, always.

Set how much it asks you

Before you hand anything off, know which approval mode you're in. Automatically approve lets Claude get on with it while still checking each action for safety and stopping to ask when something looks off. Manually approve makes it wait for you every time. Skip all approvals means nothing is checking its work — that one is for jobs you have already watched succeed on data you don't mind losing.

Anthropic's own advice matches the habit above: don't try to validate every single command, watch for the pattern instead — is it opening files or sites you never mentioned? Switch to manual approval when the task touches sensitive files or accounts, or when a mistake would be hard to undo. Deleting a file always asks, whatever mode you're in.

Write the request like a work order

A background job can't ask you a question halfway through. Anything ambiguous becomes a guess.

✗ "Tidy up the client folders"
✓ "In each folder under clients/, rename any file starting with a date so it reads YYYY-MM-DD. Don't touch anything else. List what you changed."

Do this now

Pick a job that takes you fifteen minutes of clicking.
Write it as a work order — exact scope, exact output, what not to touch.
Run it while you watch. Fix the wording where it went sideways.
Now run it again on a second folder, and go do something else.

How to know it worked

You come back to a list of exactly what changed, and spot-checking three files shows they're right.

If it did more than you asked, your work order had a gap. Add "don't touch anything else" and be specific about scope.

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