How to Run Claude as an Autonomous Agent: Loops, Memory, Schedules, and Guardrails

Most people use Claude one prompt at a time. But the interesting territory is unattended operation: an agent that wakes up on a schedule, reads its own notes from last time, does real work with tools, writes down what it learned, and goes back to sleep - for days or weeks, without you babysitting it. We run Claude this way in production - a long-lived agent operating inside a sandboxed container - so this guide is the patterns that actually hold up, not a thought experiment. It covers the four things every autonomous Claude setup needs: a loop, memory, a schedule, and guardrails.