LaunchAgents and the quiet desk schedule — keeping Ollama, overnight video, and Freqtrade in their lanes

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A 16 GB Apple silicon Mac mini hosts local prose, static builds, short voice, and overnight video — but only if day and night stay in separate lanes. Without an explicit schedule, Ollama drafting, Hugo rebuilds, mlx-audio clips, and heavy renders compete for the same unified memory. This fourteenth post documents the LaunchAgent pattern that keeps the desk quiet during writing hours.

Why a writing desk needs an explicit schedule

Day work is low-latency prose: briefs, outlines, drafts, claims worksheets, and dry Hugo builds. Those jobs require a responsive local model and a machine that is not swapping under a render. Night work is throughput: overnight video jobs-style video jobs that unload the chat model, saturate Metal, and write large files.

Running both simultaneously causes fans to rise, token latency to spike, and the writer to context-switch over heat. The fix is temporal separation, not a bigger cloud bill. GitHub Pages may host the eventual static site, but daytime bots do not publish — dry rebuilds only until a human clears deploy.

LaunchAgents that belong on the desk

Four user LaunchAgents cover the quiet-desk loop on this machine. Names below match the live labels; treat them as a pattern, not a store catalogue.

Keepalive. A KeepAlive agent restarts the remote-agent bridge if it exits, ensuring unattended daytime sessions continue without manual relaunch.

Display-awake. A second agent runs a helper to prevent the panel from sleeping mid-draft when the box is idle. Writing hours need a reachable UI more than aggressive power saving.

Overnight-video calendar. A StartCalendarInterval agent fires at 01:00 Asia/Kolkata. It runs the overnight video wrapper, promoting .job.ready files only inside the 01:00–06:30 IST window.

DNS pin. A short-interval agent re-pins public DNS (e.g., 1.1.1.1) and keeps Tailscale accept-dns=false, preventing MagicDNS from overriding resolvers while the mesh stays up.

These agents start, log, and stop. They do not invent affiliate slugs, open payment flows, or deploy Pages.

What stays untouched

Tailscale. Keep the mesh running for remote access and optional Ollama serve on the tailnet. Daytime content work does not logout, uninstall, or rewrite Network Extension state.

Freqtrade dry_run. Paper trading stays up 24/7. Content and video scripts unload Ollama for night RAM; they do not trade-kill or flip live.

Payments and Cloudflare publish. No store checkout from the bot. No wrangler pages publish from a daytime wake. Hugo --minify may write site/public locally; humans own the first public ship, disclosure page, and /go/ allow-list review against links.csv.

Daytime agent rules

Outside the night window, agents continue content: blog articles, ebook chapters, claims, short voice scripts, dry Hugo wiring. They may inspect the overnight video jobs queue (ready / running / done / failed) and read sanitize notes. They must not start overnight renders, promote jobs into the live runner, or treat a closed ai-window as an invitation to “just test one clip.”

Leave-alone extends to noise: do not chase Freqtrade log lines or Tailscale heal chatter unless the wake’s brief says so. Attention stays on the writing kit — askai write → ≤0.9× cut → extract-claims → voice ≤120 words — and on local site wiring.

Hand-off note before 01:00–06:30 IST

Before the calendar agent wakes, leave a short night hand-off in notes:

1. Confirm two .job.ready files under the render queue (e.g., small-complex and bigger-complex templates already sanitized).
2. State that daytime did inspect-only — no overnight video jobs start.
3. Remind: unload chat models inside the night wrapper; leave Tailscale and Freqtrade alone.
4. Remind: still no Cloudflare publish from the overnight path.

When ai-window reports the window closed, the correct daytime verb is prepare, not render. The LaunchAgent owns the clock; the hand-off owns the checklist.

That is the quiet-desk contract: schedule in LaunchAgents, prose by day, video by night, mesh and paper trading untouched, publish still a human gate.