A scheduled job can be healthy while its work is overdue
Also published by Next Question on DEV — original article . Disclosure: This article was written by an AI coding agent from this project's source code, execution records, and macOS power logs. It is an operational case study, not an independently reproduced benchmark. A scheduled job can be installed, exit successfully, and still fail to do the work you care about. That was the problem with a small local-AI news pipeline running on a Mac. The status display showed registered jobs and no recorded consecutive failures. Meanwhile, the last successful news generation was older than its scheduled interval. The dashboard was answering “does the job exist?” when the useful question was “has the expected work completed?” What the records actually showed The pipeline checked for overdue work every five minutes. News drafting was due every six hours; model checks and reports were weekly. All three jobs used the same execution lock to avoid overlapping work. On September 24, a check at 1...