Quoting David Crawshaw's prompt
A nightly cron prompt can automate dependency rebasing and validation via coding agents
“Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.”
David Crawshaw shares a prompt that uses a coding agent as a nightly cron job to fetch upstream changes, rebase local modifications, verify functionality, and swap in the new version autonomously. This illustrates a practical pattern for agentic software maintenance without human intervention. It's a concrete engineering use case for coding agents but represents an incremental insight rather than a major industry shift.