Watcher
In one line: A schedule or an event wakes it up; it notices something and tells a human.
What it is
A Watcher keeps an eye on something so people do not have to. It does not wait to be asked. A schedule (every hour, every morning) or an event (a deploy, a failed check) wakes it up; it looks, decides whether anything is worth a person’s attention, and only tells someone if it is.
How one run goes
- Wake up, on a schedule or because something happened.
- Look: fetch a page, read a log, call an API.
- Compare what it sees with what it saw last time, which it has remembered.
- Decide whether the difference is worth a person’s time.
- Tell someone with the evidence attached, and stay quiet when nothing changed.
An example
Every morning a Watcher opens the ten most visited product pages for one market. One now shows a price in the wrong format. It posts the page link, a screenshot and what changed to the team channel; on the other mornings it says nothing.
Where the human comes in
A human confirms before the agent opens an incident, pages someone or posts outside the team.
Use it when
The job is noticing, and on most days there is nothing to notice. It is not the right shape when a person starts the work by asking something: that is a Concierge.
Watch out for
Noise. If it pings people about everything they stop reading it. Decide up front what counts as worth telling, and keep the message short enough to read in five seconds.
Back to all patterns or the Idea Gallery. A pattern is a shape to borrow when it fits, not a category: the gallery cards do not carry one.