← Back to the collection

Delayed Work

Hit your 5-hour session limit mid-task? Stop for now and have this session pick the work back up at the reset — with the context it already has, and spending zero tokens while it waits. Same mechanism covers any “run X at 9pm” or “in 30 minutes” case.

Installation

# Add the marketplace (if not already added)
claude plugin marketplace add jtsternberg/claude-plugins

# Install the plugin
claude plugin install delayed-work@jtsternberg

Skills

`until`

The lead use case: a session limit lands mid-task, so you stop for now and resume at the reset — until 9pm quota refilled, resume the review of PR 701 at the security pass. The alternatives are babysitting the clock to type “continue”, or letting the agent poll “is it time yet?” with the quota that’s left.

It arms a background task running a wall-clock poll loop, so nothing is spent until the target time arrives; the notification wakes this session — context still loaded, so no resume note is needed — and it runs the payload itself.

It also covers the plain timed case: until 9:05pm review https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/pull/701, until in 20 minutes run the suite and report, and queueing several jobs at spaced-out times.

Pairs with a budget watcher that reports a reset time: the watcher says pause and names the reset, until turns that reset into the wake-up. Arm at the warning, not at exhaustion — once a request is rate limited there’s no turn left to arm anything — and arm before finishing the step in flight, so a limit landing mid-step leaves a watcher up rather than nothing.

Honest limits:

Claude watchers die with the session. Codex detached timers may outlive a turn, but need a live queue receiver and existing thread at fire time. Neither is a durable scheduler.
A sleeping machine freezes the loop. No form of this wakes a Mac; a target that passes during system sleep fires on wake instead of on time. Add the opt-in --caffeinate invocation flag to hold the machine awake for the life of the watcher. It stops idle sleep but cannot beat a closed lid — leave the lid open.
Background tasks can be reaped on session handoff. Monitor is only a fallback when 30 minutes or less remain; its accepted persistent: true field does not remove that cap in Claude Code 2.1.272.
Codex CLI 0.160.1 supports a detached one-shot wall-clock timer calling codex queue into the exact current thread. Detect capability before arming; enqueue success is separate from observed delivery. See the skill for private payload storage, cancellation, logs, and daemon/sleep limits.

Related: the patient-waiting ladder (in the maestro plugin) with the clock as the watched condition. For timed delivery of a prompt into another cmux surface, use the send-at skill instead — until targets the current session and needs no cmux.

Example Usage

Claude Code:

/delayed-work:until at 9pm resume the review of PR 701 where we left off
/delayed-work:until --caffeinate at 9pm resume the review of PR 701 where we left off
/delayed-work:until 9:05pm run /review-pr on https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/pull/701
/delayed-work:until in 2h run the full test suite and report failures

Codex:

$delayed-work:until in 30 minutes run the full test suite and report failures
$delayed-work:until --caffeinate in 30 minutes run the full test suite and report failures

Additional Documentation

skills/until/SKILL.md - Stop for now and resume the queued work in this session at a set time