Four Ways My Unattended Video Pipeline Died Overnight — and How I Made It Heal Itself

The morning after I lost my job, my Mac finished and filed an ASMR video. Nobody asked it to. It just ran. In the first post, I walked through the structure of the pipeline itself — ComfyUI × FFmpeg × the Freesound API, generating long-form ASMR videos with nothing but free tools. This second post covers the other half: putting that pipeline on macOS launchd so it fires at a fixed time every day, and the self-healing logic that gets the script past the "cold start" problem, where you boot the Mac and ComfyUI simply isn't running. Two numbers do most of the work here: the ComfyUI startup wait went from 180 seconds to 600, and the Freesound download timeout went from 90 seconds to 240. Before those changes, mornings failed 2–3 days a week. Why this setup works The ceiling on manual work Making a single 30-minute ambient ASMR video carefully takes 2–3 hours of hands-on time. Tuning image-generation prompts, layering the BGM, checking the loop points, building the thumbnail, filling in YouTube metadata — each step is small, but they stack up. Trying to hold 30 videos a month means 60–90 hours of pure labor. I attempted it while holding a side job, and it collapsed in two weeks. That was the first time I understood that "scaling output" isn't about moving your hands faster — it's about building a state where output accumulates without your hands at all. When I was laid off and my income went to zero, the first thing I rebuilt was this environment . Own an environment, not a workflow The essence of automation is constructing, exactly once, a mechanism where output keeps growing while you do nothing. That's precisely what daily.sh delivers: when the script finishes, ~/Desktop/ASMR/<date>_<theme>/ lands atomically with the video, thumbnail, youtube.md, and still image all in place. I just check it the next morning. Whether I step away mid-generation or I'm asleep, the files keep piling up. One line in the code embodies the whole philosophy: # 冪等性は「その日に1本でもあればskip」(1日1本・テーマ違