A 41-Second Timeout Gap Silenced an Automated Affiliate Article System for 3 Days

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A developer built a fully automated system using shell scripts and Claude Code to publish three affiliate articles daily to Hatena Blog without human involvement. For three consecutive mornings, the system ran without errors but produced zero articles, logging 'published today: 0 / target: 3' each time. The root cause was a misconfigured timeout set at 300 seconds, while the actual article-generation process required 259 seconds — leaving only a 41-second margin that was consistently exceeded. Doubling the timeout to 600 seconds resolved the issue immediately, restoring the system to its full three-article daily output. The system is designed around idempotency, meaning each scheduled run checks how many articles have already been published and generates only the remaining shortfall, ensuring the daily target is always met across morning, midday, and evening batches.

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