Last Sunday's weekly review was built, critiqued and staged, then never reached your tablet: the run handed the paper gate to a background shell and exited. A background child lives only as long as its parent.
For a week the 10-4 doc sat on disk with three decisions nobody asked you. No alarm fired, because the wrapper saw exit 0 and the health check watches the Sunday HTML, which existed. The side-effect that mattered (PDF on the device, event on the tape, Things task) was never checked.
When a process starts another one and does not wait for it, the child is a background job. On macOS a headless claude -p run is itself a child of the LaunchAgent wrapper; when the run ends, its own children are sent a termination signal. Anything still working at that moment, such as a three-minute standards-checker call, dies without a log line.
The 10-4 run did exactly this. reporter.log shows 'verified report_quick_deliver' at 18:25:45 - that line is only the path check at the top of the function. The run's last words in weekly-review.log are 'waiting on its notification', and the wrapper logged exit 0 at 18:26:25. There is no data/jarbus-events/2026-10-04.jsonl, no 10-4 Weekly Review PDF in the outbox, and no Things task.
Automation Hygiene Rule 1 says verify the side-effect, not the command. The honest shape is a foreground call with a timeout long enough for the slowest leg (the standards gate takes three to four minutes), followed by three independent witnesses: the outbox file, the event line, the task. The 10-11 run was changed to do this; its three witnesses are in tonight's log.
Three places that should agree on a Sunday night, and what they said for 10-4 versus 10-11.
grep -n "2026-10-04\|2026-10-11" /Users/tom/Claude/JARBUS/logs/reporter.log | tail -6
ls /Users/tom/Claude/PDB/data/jarbus-events/ | grep -E "10-04|10-11"
ls "/Users/tom/Claude/PDB/data/remarkable-outbox" | grep "Weekly Review" | tail -3
grep -n "exited with status" /Users/tom/Claude/PDB/logs/weekly-review.log | tail -3A background job inherits its parent's lifetime; if the parent ends first, the work ends with it, silently.