Autopilot

Autopilot is how Excellent keeps working when you're not watching. It's a scheduler around a single, frugal heartbeat — the tick — that looks at your queue and only acts when there's something to do.

How the tick works

Each tick runs a cheap check of your workspace, then spawns exactly one worker for an enabled role that has matching work — a verifier when the review queue isn't empty, a shipper when there are unclaimed todos. If nothing changed, it backs off exponentially (from about a minute up to half an hour) and spends nothing until the queue moves again. A quiet workspace costs you nothing.

Turn it on

excellent-mcp autopilot enable    # standard profile: shipper + verifier
excellent-mcp autopilot status    # what's enabled
excellent-mcp autopilot disable   # master switch off

You can also run a single beat by hand:

excellent-mcp autopilot tick

In the app, the same controls live under Settings → Agents → Autopilot.

Keep it running across restarts

So autopilot survives closing the app or rebooting, install it as a background job that fires every two minutes:

excellent-mcp autopilot daemon-install

This uses the right mechanism for your operating system — a launchd agent on macOS, a Scheduled Task on Windows, or a printed cron line on Linux. Remove it with autopilot daemon-uninstall; check it with autopilot daemon-status.

The guardrails still hold

Autopilot doesn't loosen anything:

• It's off by default, behind a master switch.
• Every role runs under a budget.
• The ship/verify gate still applies — an autopilot shipper can't approve its own work; a verifier (or you) has to.

So the worst case for a runaway tick is bounded spend, and nothing reaches done without a second party.