An Approval Gate for Agents That Run While You Sleep

Overnight AI agents draft emails, tickets, and posts while you're asleep — this shows how to queue their actions for a morning approval pass instead of firing blind.

The problem with "runs overnight, unattended"

A cron job that kicks off a Claude Code agent at 2am to triage inbox threads, draft support replies, or scan RSS feeds for content ideas is genuinely useful — until the agent decides one of those drafts should go out immediately. Nobody is watching at 2am. If the draft is wrong, or a scraped page contained an injected instruction, it ships before anyone notices. The fix isn't "don't run agents overnight" — it's separating drafting (fine to do unattended) from sending (needs a human awake to look at it).

Impri sits at that boundary. The overnight agent pushes every side-effecting action to Impri and stops. It doesn't wait around — there's no one to notify at 2am anyway. You review the stack when you wake up.

Setting a long expiry for the wake-up window

The default expires_in (72 hours) is fine, but for a nightly batch you want actions to survive until morning without needing to be precise about timing. Set it explicitly and generously — a support-reply batch from a 2am run should still be valid at 9am, and probably still relevant at lunch:

import requests
import os

IMPRI_KEY = os.environ["IMPRI_API_KEY"]

def queue_overnight_draft(kind, title, body, target_url=None):
    resp = requests.post(
        "https://api.impri.dev/v1/actions",
        headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {IMPRI_KEY}"},
        json={
            "kind": kind,
            "title": title,
            "preview": {"format": "markdown", "body": body},
            "target_url": target_url,
            "expires_in": 43200,  # 12h — covers an overnight run through late morning
            "editable": ["preview.body"],
        },
    )
    resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.json()["id"]

# Called once per drafted reply during the 2am batch run
for ticket in nightly_triage_batch():
    queue_overnight_draft(
        kind="support.reply",
        title=f"Draft reply: {ticket.subject}",
        body=ticket.drafted_reply,
        target_url=ticket.helpdesk_url,
    )

The agent's job ends at queue_overnight_draft. It never polls, never waits, never executes — that happens later, from a separate process, only after a human has looked at the inbox.

Batch review in the morning, not one card at a time

A single overnight run can produce a dozen drafts. Reviewing them one by one on your phone before coffee is tedious enough that people start rubber-stamping — which defeats the point. Use the bulk-decision endpoint from a morning review pass to approve the obvious ones together and open only the ones that need a closer read:

# Check one action's status before deciding
curl -s https://api.impri.dev/v1/actions/act_101 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $IMPRI_API_KEY"

# Decide on several at once via the bulk endpoint, rather than
# one API call (or one inbox tap) per drafted reply
curl -s -X POST https://api.impri.dev/v1/actions/bulk-decision \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $IMPRI_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"ids": ["act_101", "act_102", "act_105"]}'

In practice most people just do this from the inbox web UI on their phone — the bulk endpoint matters when you're scripting a review pass over a batch you've already read, which is a judgment call you make, not something Impri infers on its own.

Push notifications so you don't have to remember to check

Nobody wants to open an app every morning just in case. Wire a push channel so the overnight batch actually surfaces instead of sitting silently in an inbox: ntfy or web push for a phone buzz, or Telegram if you already triage there. See notifications for setup and telegram-approval if you want approve/reject buttons directly in a chat thread — useful for a half-asleep glance before getting out of bed.

What this doesn't solve

Impri holds the decision; it doesn't decide anything about when your agent should run or how it should batch work — that scheduling logic is yours (cron, a queue, whatever you already use). It also doesn't retroactively protect you from an agent that has its own direct credentials to the sending service — the gate only holds if the overnight process's only path to sending is through the approved action. Wrap the actual send/publish call so it hard-depends on the approved final_preview, as described in the approval guide.

Next step

Start with quickstart to get an API key, then wire your nightly job to push actions instead of executing them directly.